


Two Evils

by sigo



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Armitage Hux Being An Asshole, Armitage Hux Has Feelings, Armitage Hux Has Issues, Armitage Hux Smokes, Armitage Hux is Not Nice, Bottom Armitage Hux, Cannibalism, Darth Tantrum and his Evil Space Ginger, Duelling, First Kiss, First Meetings, First Time, Kylo Ren Has Feelings, Kylo Ren Has Issues, Kylo Ren in Love, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, M/M, Mirror Sex, Phasma Ships It, Planets, Possessive Kylo Ren, Pre-The Force Awakens, Psychopaths In Love, That's Not How The Force Works, There's zombies here but its not their show, Top Kylo Ren, Virgin Kylo Ren, Zombies are canon in Star Wars but I'm not following whatever zombie rules they have
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:34:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24300664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigo/pseuds/sigo
Summary: Kylo looked away, his face clouded, and moved to put his helmet back on. Hux stopped him with a hand on top of it as he moved to lift it up. “No, we’re past this now,” he said. “Leave it off. With me, if not otherwise. Alright, Ren?”Kylo took a deep breath and then set his helmet aside on the coffee table. Hux was studying his face again, something he had always found uncomfortable. “Trying to sort out which bits I got from her?” Kylo muttered.“No,” Hux said, and it rang true. Kylo looked at him in surprise. “Just...you. I’m only looking at you.” Hux said. “You’d prefer it if I didn’t? If no one did?”“Generally.”“But you’ll allow me this?”Kylo looked at Hux, observing as much as he was observed. There was more information to parse through here, with Hux looking at his face rather than the mask. He longed to dip into his mind but didn’t dare after Hux had taken such a dislike to it before. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll allow it.”// Hux and Kylo's first meeting on planetary detail together before the Finalizer.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Comments: 14
Kudos: 99





	Two Evils

**Author's Note:**

> Possible trigger warnings are detailed in the end notes. I know I put a graphic violence warning on everything to be safe but this objectively has graphic violence in it. Read safely! Not beta'd, mistakes are mine.

Luke Skywalker, quoting the wisdom of the past Masters, had once told a young boy named Ben Solo who had newly discovered the fact that life would end and was afraid for his parents, “Death is a natural part of life. Do not mourn those who pass back into the Force. Love strong enough to cause you pain is the shadow of greed, and fear of loss is the path into the Dark.”

Ben had died in the massacre of the Jedi on Ach-To, but Kylo Ren remembered Luke’s words now, brought forward in his mind by the recent attack at Krennic Park, in which eighteen officers were slaughtered and then disposed of with not a tear shed. Master Snoke had sent Kylo here, to this backwater First Order base on an Outer Rim planet too small to be properly named, only called H-19. It was a less illustrious first assignment than Kylo had anticipated, and he’d had to tamp down on his disappointment in front of his Master. Eventually he was to be assigned to the Star Destroyer _Finalizer_ with his co-commander, General Hux, but for now that man was here, and so here also was Kylo.

H-19 was -- sort of -- uninhabited, and bare of all resources save one: the planet’s deep earth was rich in the luminescent blue fuel necessary to power a fleet of Star Destroyers, and the First Order’s star General was overseeing the mining of it personally, owing to the problems that had occurred with the operation. Kylo had been informed upon his arrival that the population of H-19 had been wiped out by a disease reminiscent of the Blackwing Virus, here just referred to as “the Sickness,” and the reanimated dead called the Stricken had been wreaking havoc on the supply lines the First Order endeavored to set up.

Kylo had also, upon his arrival, succeeded in royally pissing off his new co-commander. The man had met him personally in H-Base’s largest docking bay, standing tall and stiff in full uniform and coat, the edges of his red hair visible beneath his command cap. Kylo had disembarked from his shuttle, wearing the mask he’d forged specifically for his first assignment, and been struck at once by Hux’s face and manner. He was nearly Kylo’s height but sleek where Kylo was bulky. He looked nearly Kylo’s age too, only slightly older. Kylo thought that his face was exceedingly handsome, even with his hair slicked away from it severely and the cold look in his pale eyes. Perhaps especially because of those eyes and the cruel twist of his mouth that passed for a greeting smile. It had made Kylo’s stomach drop, that slight grin. It was very like Kylo to wipe it from Hux’s face in the next instant. Wanting very much to impress this young officer, Kylo had barked through his vocoder, “I am here to expedite General Hux’s completion of this assignment. Take me to him.”

At that, Hux’s face had gone cold. “ _I_ am General Hux,” he’d hissed. “I was informed that Lord Ren would be _assisting_ me. I confess I had no expectations as to what a Knight of Ren would look like, but nevertheless you’ve...exceeded them.” He looked over Kylo’s robes as though they were a particularly disgusting mess left for him to clean up, before his eyes came back up and bored into the visor of his mask, not cowed in the least by it. Kylo adjusted his mental picture of the man in front of him to include his name and title, and added _proud_ to his list of Hux’s attributes along with _attractive_.

Perhaps in retaliation for Kylo’s gaff with his title, Hux hadn’t given Kylo any tasks or invited him to any meetings his first week on base. Kylo had reached out through his datapad and merely received a forwarded calendar invite to a celebration of the base’s first mining success. So, he’d gone. It was held in Krennic Park, a large durasteel pavilion surrounded by a copse of H-19’s characteristic evergreen forests. The sunken fire pit in the center of the pavilion was lit and roaring cheerily and there were drinks all around. Kylo did not partake as he was loath to remove his mask among these revellers. He stalked through the groups of officers, chatting and drinking and smoking with each other, and reached out on instinct to brush against their minds, finding nothing of substance anywhere. Most of them were only concerned with getting well and truly blasted, some of them preoccupied with finding someone to take back to their quarters later.

At the far end of the hall, Kylo’s wandering consciousness hit something sharp and retreated. Hux. Kylo made his way there and then stalled, stepping aside to feign interest in some sort of drinking game happening next to the pit, as he saw Hux was engaged in conversation with a trooper captain. She had kept her mirrored armor on for this evening, but left her helmet elsewhere. They both held white plastisteel cups of the evening’s libation, and Hux looked decidedly at ease with her, grinning widely as she spoke. Kylo tuned in to what they were saying without looking toward them.

“Come on,” said the captain, “When’s the last time you got any? It’d do you good.”

“Phas, enough,” Hux was laughing. “You and I have different ideas of what’s good for me.”

“It’s not going to happen if you keep standing in this stupid corner with me. There’s several gentlemen here that fit your type.”

“Phasma,” Hux said sternly, although the timbre of his voice betrayed his continued amusement. “There’s no one on the damn base that ranks with me, and a scandal of any sort would not ‘do me good.’”

“What about your new co-commander, then?” Phasma asked. “He’s built. You like them big.” Kylo felt his face redden beneath his mask and breathed out a harsh sound through the vocoder that made the players in the game glance toward him. “Pity about the robe,” Phasma continued, “Can’t see his backside. I bet it’s great.”

“Hm,” Hux said neutrally, taking a sip of his drink. Kylo felt Hux’s eyes on him and held his posture steady against the urge to shrink down. “The body’s tolerable, but with that mask? He can’t be handsome enough to tempt _me_. And I am not charitable enough to take him on in spite of that.”

Kylo felt his blood run cold, and then molten hot in rage. Hux’s words cut deep, deeper than the man could ever know. Kylo knew his face was unusual: his features offset, teeth and nose crooked, hair too dark for a face so pale, and his skin dotted with moles. He’d privately considered himself ugly from a young age, a conglomeration of his parent’s looks that just didn’t work. His hand came to the hilt of his saber on his belt. Co-commander or not, he’d run Hux through for that insult. He’d watch the life fade from those green eyes that had so arrested him before.

But no sooner had he grabbed his weapon than a chorus of screams filled the pavilion. Infected poured in from the openings in the walls though there had been none sighted this close to the base before. Their movements were disjointed but swift, what remained of their clothing torn and filthy. Their flesh was in varying states of decay; some had only a slight green pallor -- the most recently stricken -- and some so putrefied as to seem barely humanoid, what remained of their flesh gray and brittle, their eyes and lips and tongues long since rotted away, their teeth showing through in everlasting snarls. All of them were bubbling with black sores. Their putrid smell overcame all other scents.

A few of the officers, purely by the chance of being too near the archways, were promptly torn into by the beasts. Kylo turned to face the archway closest to him and was showered in the arterial spray of the Lieutenant there, held in the grasp of two infected as one ripped into her throat with its jaws. As people fled in every direction, General Hux’s voice cut through the din. “Are you not armed?” he yelled. “ _Shoot them!_ ”

Hux himself had drawn his blaster, and he fired it now, picking off the creatures in that end of the pavilion with terrible efficiency. Phasma beside him also made use of her weapon, facing the other way, each of them guarding the other’s blind spots. Kylo ignited his saber and went to work, beheading each of the undead he approached in turn. The crackling red of his saber seemed to draw the ones that still had eyes toward him, and even the blind ones followed their lead. “It was the fire,” he called over to Hux. “They follow the light. Or the heat. Something.”

Hux looked at him for a moment and nodded, accepting that judgement. It shouldn’t have warmed Kylo’s heart like it did. His fury was slipping away, sated by the destruction of the cannibal corpses. When at last the hall was quiet, the remaining officers unhurt and still alert, scanning the treeline with their blasters primed, Kylo returned to Hux.

“We’ll need to put the wounded down,” Hux told him. Kylo lifted his saber’s hilt, ready to ignite it again, and Hux added, “We’ll burn the bodies. We already have the means to.” The fire pit had been turned into a pyre, and the remaining officers retired back into the base for the night, less eighteen of their comrades. There were no words spoken, no sniffling in the quiet night. For them there had been only the dutiful completion of this task and then abandonment. It seemed an absence of mourning. Despite Luke’s teachings, he’d wept over the bodies of his students. Kylo couldn’t imagine Hux weeping.

They had been the last to leave, even after Phasma excused herself. Hux had watched the bodies of the H-19 infected and of his officers burn for a long while, the light of the flames playing upon his face, and Kylo had stayed beside him because Hux did not object and because Kylo very much enjoyed observing him.

“You’re a good shot,” Kylo said, breaking their long silence. Hux seemed not to hear him, no acknowledgement forthcoming. “Not all your officers were.” Kylo added, wincing as he realized the General might take that as a slight.

Hux sighed, looking at Kylo at last. “Few are as practiced with a blaster as I am,” he agreed. “Their standard training doesn’t prioritize close combat. It’s why these attacks have had a greater toll on our operations here than they might have otherwise.”

“You’ve been in close combat, then?”

“This is not my first planetary detail. Close, yes, though not most often. I served as a sniper. Close was not ideal. It still happened from time to time. Got to use this,” Hux touched the holster on his thigh where his blaster rested. Kylo was adjusting his mental picture of Hux again, adding that he had the _right to be proud_ , at least as it applied to combat. And then Hux’s eyes landed on the hilt of Kylo’s saber. “You handled yourself well.”

Kylo ducked his head down under the weight of the praise before remembering himself and standing straight again. His mind went blank. Had he? Yes, he supposed so. His form in battle had never been complimented before, only critiqued. “Thank you,” he mumbled, the vocoder distorting any tremble from his voice.

Hux’s mouth quirked up in that almost-grin at him again, and Kylo was afraid the man had scented out his weakness and was about to exploit it, to needle Kylo's own inexperience in true combat. Kylo prepared to defend the merits of his training, but instead Hux said, “I had previously thought that weapons of that sort were a myth. A story for children.”

“Oh,” Kylo said, taking his saber from his belt and holding it out in his palms for Hux to look at. “No, though they are difficult to master. Particularly without the use of the Force.”

“I had believed,” Hux eyed him playfully, “that was a story as well.”

Courage grew in Kylo’s heart, as well as something else. Something hot low in his stomach. “Are you asking for a demonstration?”

“If you don’t mind.”

Kylo concentrated on the saber in his hands, levitating it slowly up several inches and giving it a spin before slowly lowering it back down. Kylo’s skin prickled when Hux leaned in for a closer look, his pale eyes bright and wide. Kylo briefly ran his fingertips across the edge of Hux’s mind, searching for a further reaction, and Hux jerked his gaze back up to Kylo’s mask.

“Is that you?” He asked, voice cold. In his aura, wonder was replaced with frigid anxiety. “I felt it before. Before the infected attacked. It’s you, isn’t it? A headache that comes and goes.”

Kylo was taken aback. “You’re not supposed to feel that.”

“Well, refrain from it,” Hux snarled at him, his good humor obliterated. “I put up with a great deal at the request of our Supreme Leader, but I will not stand having my mind invaded by an overgrown whelp in a mask.”

Kylo reeled back, burnt by Hux’s anger and the knowledge that Hux had seen his inexperience after all. Hux stalked away from the pavilion into the night, and Kylo called after him lamely, “I’m twenty-four!”

  
  


The next morning, Kylo found his calendar populated with an event -- General Hux was at last inclined to clue him in to the workings of the mines. He met Hux in the crisp dawn air outside the main hangar and boarded a shuttle with him. Inside, Kylo sat with several troopers and a now-helmeted Captain Phasma. Hux alone wore no covering on his face.

They were transported to the nearest opening into the mines, and disembarked. It was a vast quarry cut into the earth, manned and supervised by troopers. On one end, fluorescent blue ore bubbled up to the surface. A pump was draining it from the tunnels, and troopers were loading each filled tank onto waiting hover-transports. One unit of troopers guided drilling droids into position over one of the other pockets of ore they’d detected, ready to start the extraction process.

Despite Snoke’s ire about the overdue assignment, Kylo thought that everything was running efficiently, to his eye. Then, a sizable group of Stricken appeared across the quarry. Drawn by the noise and, perhaps, Kylo thought, by the heat of the surfaced blue ore. The Stricken launched themselves over the edge of the quarry, hurtling to the bottom where their bodies smashed upon the ground. Two of them dashed their heads open and did not rise again, but the rest continued forward. They were startlingly quick, even the ones that had broken their legs pulling themselves forward at a rapid pace toward the working troopers.

The troopers dropped what they were doing and drew their weapons, firing on their undead assailants. Those who had arrived with Hux and Kylo rushed to the aid of their brethren, and Hux drew his blaster beside Kylo, steadying his aim and then picking off infected from afar. “If one of them reaches the ore the whole batch is contaminated,” Hux told Kylo offhandedly as he fired, every shot finding its mark seemingly without effort. “It dissolves them, and I don’t trust it in our destroyers’ engines afterward. We have to mark the whole ore pocket as lost.”

Kylo understood suddenly exactly why the process had been so slow. Every attack must be treated as a possible end to operations at that mine, and every hand dropped their tasks to defend it. “How many per day?” he asked.

Hux snorted. “How many her hour, you mean? This was a densely populated planet before the Sickness. Scarcely twenty minutes goes by without at least one of them wandering into each mine. But often it’s a group of them.” He lined up his blaster and shot the last of this group mere feet before it would have encountered the pool of glowing ore. “Do you want a tour?”

“I’ve seen enough,” Kylo sighed. “There’s no way to speed this up, is there?” He resigned himself to a longer planetary detail than he had hoped for.

“If there were,” Hux said, “I prefer to think I’d have figured it out by now. My stormtroopers are doing their jobs to the best of their abilities. Slow extraction is better than none at all, which is the worst case. You may communicate that to our Supreme Leader yourself, just as I have. He may deign to listen to you. Come, one of the other sites is visible from a lookout on the far side. Keep your weapon drawn.”

Kylo accompanied Hux around the quarry and into the thick trees there. The very air seemed green within them, and the distant shrieks of infected echoed like strange birdsong. Hux kept his blaster primed, and Kylo soon saw it was not from paranoia. When they reached the lookout, a metal structure situated high in one of the massive trees with a ladder reaching the ground, the two troopers stationed beneath it were quite deceased.

Four Stricken had overpowered them and cracked their white plastisteel armor like the shells of crustaceans at a dinner table, scooping out the slick red meat within and bringing it to their mouths in stringy chunks. One of them was so decayed that the entrails of the trooper it feasted upon fell straight through its jaws and down onto its torso. Two of the others had evidently eaten well in the last weeks. Their dead stomachs were distended, one of them to the point of bursting.

“Would you?” Hux asked, stepping aside to allow Kylo past him. The sound of his voice alerted the Stricken to their presence, and they struggled to their feet, eager for a fresh kill. Kylo ignited his saber and, as before, they were drawn to it, quickening their pace and reaching out for him with gray hands and black nails. Kylo made short work of them, beheading them with the ease that a Corellian prize gardener would prune their roses. “Thank you, Ren.” Hux said, and stepped over the felled dead to mount the ladder and climb up.

The other quarry was twice the size of the one they’d just visited. Kylo watched the troopers working there scurry about like white bugs while Hux took a call from his Lieutenant, Mitaka, on his datapad. From the sound of it, Mitaka’s report concerned the outcome of a battle in the Core Worlds. Thanks to the assistance of the New Republic, the Resistance had prevailed on Kuat. Hux hung up the call at last with a deep, weary breath and turned toward Kylo.

“I don’t have many good things to say about General Organa,” Hux quipped, and Kylo felt himself bristle at the mention of his mother. “She’s competent at what she does. There, that’s the extent of it. But when she makes a mistake...and she will...I’ll put her down myself.”

“No,” Kylo said at once, and Hux looked at him strangely. “She’s mine. I owe her a debt to repay in pain.”

“Hm,” Hux said, considering that information. “You’re a bit young to be feuding with her.”

“So are you,” Kylo snapped. “I read your profile last night. You’re only twenty-nine. Stop acting like you’re an Imperial relic.”

Hux sneered at him, “I have no desire to be mistaken for an Imperial. What did Organa do to you?”

Kylo’s answers came to the front of his mind and he dismissed them. _She sent me away to her brother, to let him try and declaw me. She was afraid of me. Did your mother look at you with horror in her eyes when you cried so hard that you shook the walls? Do you know what it's like to come into being connected to the mind of your mother and then have her rip herself away from you out of fear? Do you know what it feels like?_ He couldn’t tell Hux that.

Hux sniffed. “Keep your secrets then.”

Upon their return to the base they parted ways. Kylo went to the base’s cantina to get something to eat. He’d missed dinner and breakfast and it was now nearly 13:00 hours. He obtained a cellophane-wrapped sandwich, hardly looking at the type, and a bottle of cold sugared caf, and started to exit the cantina for the privacy of his own room when his wandering mind caught the edge of a conversation occurring across the room at one of the officers’ tables.

It was Mitaka, a short and slight little man with black hair and eyes and olive skin. He was deep in conversation with the sharp-featured Unamo and baby-faced Thanisson beside him. These three officers would eventually be accompanying Hux and Kylo aboard the _Finalizer_. The present topic of their conversation was Kylo himself.

“Does he really rank with General Hux?” Unamo was saying incredulously. “That doesn’t make him a General, does it?”

“Nah,” Thanisson said dismissively. “He’s not in the Order. He’s one of Snoke’s men, that old alien with the deep coffers.”

“Do we have to do what he says?” Unamo asked, screwing up her face.

“Has he told you to do anything?” Mitaka asked her.

“No, not yet. But say he did, would I have to jump to it?”

“Knowing Hux you ought to check with him first.” Thanisson said, biting into the magenta fruit he’d chosen as a part of his lunch. “He doesn’t like anything going on behind his back. And Lord Ren doesn’t know our ways yet.”

“Yeah, I’d hate to see the General mad,” Unamo agreed.

“It’s terrifying,” Mitaka said conspiratorially. Of the three, he worked the most closely with Hux.

“You get off on it,” Thanisson teased him.

“Do not!”

“Do too!” Thanisson pitched his voice up and batted his eyelashes, “Oh, General, I promise I won’t be late with your reports again, only please don’t punish me.” Mitaka launched his spoon at Thanisson, who dodged it easily, laughing.

“What do you think the General gets off on?” Unamo mused, immediately seizing on it as a particularly amusing trifle.

Mitaka groaned and covered his red face with his hands. “No, don’t, I won’t be able to look him in the eye later.”

“He probably jacks off thinking about schematics,” Thanisson whispered, leaning in toward his company. Unamo stifled her laughter in her hands and Mitaka put his head down on the table, his ears so red they verged on purple. Kylo snorted to himself inside his mask and took another step forward, about to exit the cantina, when Thanisson continued. “Say, what about Lord Ren? What do you think does it for him?”

“Is he even human?” Mitaka asked, glad for a reprieve from conversation about himself or Hux. “Do either of you know?”

Thanisson and Unamo both shrugged, considering it. Unamo spoke first. “Maybe he’s a droid.”

“Droids don’t use the Force,” Thanisson disagreed.

“How do we even know he does?” Unamo challenged him.

“You saw him use his lightsaber at Krennic Park.”

“I saw him use a big vibroblade. It doesn’t mean he’s a Jedi.”

“Sith.”

“Whatever. All of them are supposed to be dead. Skywalker’s school got burnt to the ground years ago.”

“Yeah, and what do you think could even do that? Kill all those Jedi, the tiny ones _and_ the ones that could fight back? It’s got to be one of their own. I bet he _is_ a Sith.” Mitaka said decisively.

Kylo dropped what he was carrying. He smelled smoke, heard the screams of his fellow students. He saw their frightened eyes lit blue by his blade in the night. He charged across the cantina toward Mitaka’s table, hoisting the man up into the air. Unamo screamed and Thanisson backed up so fast he fell backward in his chair. Kylo tossed Mitaka’s prone form into the wall panel behind him hard enough to dent it.

The cantina fell silent, half its occupants having risen from their seats, staring at him. Ready to bolt. Kylo drew in a slow breath and released it, and then growled through his helmet. “When I give you an order, Chief Petty Officer Unamo, you had better jump to it. To answer your question.”

Kylo turned and left, scooping up his discarded items from the floor on his way out. He ate and drank in his room silently, dreading the summons from General Hux that was sure to come. Scarcely ten minutes later it did, not as a message but simply a new event on his calendar. No option to accept or decline it. 17:00, Hux’s quarters.

  
  


Hux’s quarters were much bigger than Kylo’s. Of course, the base hadn’t been built to house two commanders. Hux had a large desk by the door and a living space with two round cushioned chairs and a coffee table by a window overlooking the woods, and a roaring fire in a durasteel fireplace complete with a mantle. His bed and refresher were secreted away off of the main room. Upon entering, Kylo was invited to join Hux in the other of the two chairs by the window. He took his seat heavily. There was a full steaming tea set on the table in front of them. Hux was scrolling through his datapad with a bored expression on his face, and after motioning for Kylo to have some tea, didn’t acknowledge him further. Kylo poured himself a cup of the rich black tea and added three spoons of sugar and then paused. Several minutes into silence, Kylo sighed heavily through his vocoder. Hux paused his movements, replacing his datapad in his uniform pocket and turning toward Kylo at last.

“Would you like to tell me why you saw fit to frighten my Lieutenant half to death?” he asked drily.

“No,” said Kylo.

Hux’s face shifted subtly in anger. “Can I expect that it will not happen again?”

“No.”

Hux’s eyes narrowed, the anger in him rising. Still, it was different from Kylo’s. It was cold. “Trying to look like Vader, are you? Vader wore a helmet because he couldn’t breathe without it. Can you? Why do you hide your face, Lord Ren?”

Kylo sat still for a long moment, and then reached up and undid the clasps to his helmet, releasing it with a pneumatic hiss, and removed it from his head, holding it in his lap.

Hux was silent for a long moment, studying Kylo’s face, filling that void of information for himself, and then he said, “Oh. So that’s why. You’re hiding the faces of your rebel parents.” He laughed, “That’s why you wanted Organa to yourself. Well, I won’t stop you. Personally I found patricide especially freeing.”

Kylo looked away, his face clouded, and moved to put his helmet back on. Hux stopped him with a hand on top of it as he moved to lift it up. “No, we’re past this now,” he said. “Leave it off. With me, if not otherwise. Alright, Ren?”

Kylo took a deep breath and then set his helmet aside on the coffee table. Hux was studying his face again, something he had always found uncomfortable. “Trying to sort out which bits I got from her?” Kylo muttered.

“No,” Hux said, and it rang true. Kylo looked at him in surprise. “Just...you. I’m only looking at you.” Hux said. “You’d prefer it if I didn’t? If no one did?”

“Generally.”

“But you’ll allow me this?”

Kylo looked at Hux, observing as much as he was observed. There was more information to parse through here, with Hux looking at his face rather than the mask. He longed to dip into his mind but didn’t dare after Hux had taken such a dislike to it before. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll allow it.”

“Can I get you anything stronger? I have a nice dry red from Naboo.”

“No.”

“I’ve always found Mitaka to be an exemplary officer,” Hux said, pouring himself a cup of tea from the pot in front of them and drinking it black. “What was it that upset you so?”

Kylo struggled to describe the situation in a manner that wouldn’t make him look petty. “They were talking about me.”

“Not _to you_ , I assume.”

“No. They were talking about you too.”

“It’s to be expected,” Hux said lightly. “If I launched everyone who gossiped about me into the walls I’d have more dents in the halls than men staffing them. I hadn’t anticipated a mind reader being surprised by idle chat.”

Kylo winced. He hadn’t actually been around this many people in the last ten years. He left that unsaid. “It was obscene.”

Hux’s eyes glittered, his interest piqued. “Tell me.”

“They said that--” Kylo cut himself off and then looked at his helmet in front of him, talking to it rather than to Hux, and finally was able to say it. “They said you probably...pleasure yourself while thinking about schematics.”

Hux barked out a laugh, startling in the silence of his chambers. Kylo looked up at him, shocked. “Incredible,” Hux said. “I haven’t heard that one before. That was Mitaka?” He seemed genuinely delighted.

“No, Thanisson.”

“Pity, I’d hoped Mitaka had grown a spine. Nevertheless, I’d thank you to refrain from throwing my officers around, Ren. I have few enough of them here as it is. Look at me.”

Kylo did, meeting Hux’s gaze. “What?”

“Nothing, except that I want you to look at me.”

Kylo’s mouth twitched in annoyance. “Is our meeting at an end?” he asked.

“If you won’t open that bottle of wine with me, then yes. I suppose it is.” Hux said. Kylo got up to leave, fixing his helmet back on his head. Hux’s glittering pale eyes followed him out the door, and Kylo almost swore he could feel them on him all the way back to his room.

  
  


“What are you thinking of?” Phasma asked suddenly. “You’re not even listening to this garbage. You love reports.” Phasma currently sat across from Hux as they listened to the last week’s documentation, a weekly ritual for them. Usually, she was the more distracted party between the two of them. But tonight, Hux was on his second drink and his eyes were distant, recalling something that held his attention much better than the statistics droning on.

“Huh? Oh, nothing.”

Phasma stopped the mechanical recitation of her datapad, unwilling to drop the subject now that she’d scented blood. Occasionally Hux regretted having struck up a friendship with her all those years ago. She grinned at him over her own wine glass. “Hold on… Are you seeing someone?”

“No,” Hux said at once, glaring at her.

“But you want to be,” Phasma teased. “You met someone!”

Hux sighed, giving her one last reproachful look, but surrendered. “I was thinking of the incredible difference a pair of fine eyes make in a face.”

“Armie! You’ve gone soft. Whose face? Whose eyes?”

Hux struggled with it, swirling his wine in his glass and then forgetting to drink, his face looking almost pained. “...Lord Ren,” he said at last.

“Kriff!” Phasma shouted.

“I know, I--”

“You should’ve listened to me. I knew he’d be your type.”

“It can’t be. He’s...intense. Sex wouldn’t be just sex with him, and a relationship...well, you know I’ve given up on that.”

Phasma looked at Hux fondly -- insubordinately, as was her way -- and told him, “If you jumped into bed with him tonight I’d be happier for you than if you studied him for a year first. Happiness in relationships is by chance. It’s better to know less of the other’s defects up front.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

“Anyway, you like him?”

“Like him? Hardly. He’s brutish and difficult and temperamental.”

“He took his mask off today?”

“He did.”

“Well?”

“I admit he’s uncommonly handsome,” Hux groaned. Phasma hid a snorting laugh behind her hand. “This doesn’t leave my room, got it?” Phasma leaned in. “He’s Organa’s son. The missing Jedi student from ten years ago.”

Phasma gasped at that, “The rebels have been telling the whole galaxy he died.”

“Everyone else under Skywalker’s care did. I have my suspicions about that now, having seen the result of Ren’s temper for myself,” Hux mused.

“So you aren’t pursuing him because he’s rebel stock?” Phasma pressed.

“No,” Hux said, swirling his glass again and this time drinking deeply. “No, I don’t think he’s a spy. He’s...earnest.”

“Earnestly awful,” Phasma tittered, having the time of her life. “Oh Armie, he _is_ perfect for you. How handsome are we talking? I want to see him!”

“I don’t think he’ll be removing his helmet in mixed company for a long while yet. Phas, he’s like a lost prince. Shit, I guess he is one. But not too pretty.”

“Mm, you do like to be the pretty one.”

“His mouth is positively sinful,” Hux divulged, knowing it would make Phasma bray with laughter. It did. “But it just can’t be. The way he looked at me today with those dark eyes -- Phas, shut up,” Hux added, seeing the way Phasma was leering at him, “He looked at me like he wanted to...to _eat_ me.”

Phasma’s blue eyes crinkled at that and she fixed him with her best convincing look, the one she normally reserved for requisitioning more resources for her troopers. “Maybe he does. Maybe you should let him. If he gets too intense, you know how to handle yourself.”

  
  


There was an Empire Day ball to be held on base that very night, complete with decorations and a refreshment budget. Kylo expressed to Hux, as they walked together through the hall on their way to a briefing on the adjustments being made to the mining transports, that he found the idea to be a waste of time.

“We’re behind schedule here, and we’re closing the mines early so that your officers can get drunk celebrating the Empire that lost the last galactic war?” His face was supremely expressive, which Hux found refreshing in contrast to that stupid helmet. Ren had been going without it the last week, to these meetings with the mining troopers if not to the officers meetings.

“On principle I don’t disagree,” Hux said, “The Empire was a waste, and the holiday more so. My father used to throw the most nauseating parties every year, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you. But it does keep up morale, having little breaks like these.”

“Morale?” Kylo rolled his eyes. “It sounds so boring. What’s exciting about a ball?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Hux said, his face taking on a wicked expression, “but balls are always a subject which makes me energetic.” Kylo choked on his spit, coughing once and growing red, and Hux laughed. A full laugh, not a restrained one. The officers that had been walking in the opposite direction toward them blanched at the sight of Hux’s mirth and backtracked two full steps to turn down a different hall. “You’ll come, won’t you?” Hux pressed.

“If you’re counting on it,” Kylo ground out.

“Perfect. It starts at 19:00, in Tarkin Hall. It’s the only room on base big enough, since we aren’t going to attempt Krennic Park again.”

Kylo arrived at 20:00 hours, striding into the darkened hall in his helmet and long robes but not his cloak. There were officers and unmasked troopers mingling throughout the wide durasteel floor and on the catwalks and balconies above, drinking hard spirits out of plastisteel cups. The hall was crowned in swathes of red and black fabric, and the lights were dimmed and colored red. Old Imperial tunes were playing faintly from the comm system.

Kylo cast around for Hux, already feeling misplaced, and felt his presence in the upper levels. He joined Hux on one of the catwalks above, finding him conversing with Mitaka and Thanisson, who made a hasty retreat at the sight of Kylo. Hux greeted him by taking his elbow in hand, unusually forward. The pressure of Hux’s hand on his arm made his breath catch. Kylo brushed his mind on instinct before he thought better of it, and found him drunk.

“You should slow down,” he said, growling it out low through his vocoder.

“I was planning on it,” Hux said, “until Mitaka brought me another. I do think he’s trying to make me embarrass myself. Come, let’s go out on the wall. I want to smoke. The air will clear my head.”

Kylo let Hux lead him by his arm out through one of the upper-level doorways on the mezzanine onto the steel walkway that circled the outside of the second floor of the building. It had been drizzling all evening. The air was damp and cold, smelling of rain, and Hux took a big breath, closing his eyes in bliss.

“You like this?” Kylo asked.

“I do,” Hux said. “It’s bracing. Take that ridiculous thing off, no one will disturb us out there. They aren’t bold enough.” He brought a cigarette tin and lighter out of his uniform pockets, setting about lighting himself one.

Kylo removed his helmet and set it on the wide durasteel half-wall in front of them. The humidity in the air began to make his hair curl as the damp wind blew it up away from his face. Hux succeeded in lighting his cigarette with an endearing little “Ah ha!” and flicked his lighter closed, meaning to store it again. Kylo caught his wrist, reading the engraving on it.

“A. Hux.”

Hux chuckled around the first drag on his cigarette. “Armitage. And now you have me at a disadvantage, Ren.”

“That’s my title, not my last name,” Kylo said.

“Ah. Doubly so, then.”

“Kylo. My name is Kylo.”

“Ky-lo,” Hux tried it out, and hearing his name in Hux’s voice shouldn’t make Kylo feel the way he did. As though he’d been hit by lightning. He released Hux’s arm, letting the man put away his lighter.

Hux brought that hand up again, empty, to hold his cigarette between his index and middle fingers as he breathed out. The white smoke curling up from his full lips into the rainy evening sky was mesmerizing. It caught some of the red light from indoors. That low heat was building in Kylo's stomach again at the sight of it. Stricken screeched from the woods, their keening howls mixing with the patter of the light rain on the metal buildings of the base and the foliage beyond it.

“So, Ren,” Hux said, rolling the R flamboyantly and eyeing him, “What is it that you’ve been doing in your off hours here on our pleasant little H-19?”

“Oh,” Kylo said. “I meditate. It’s, um, communing with the Force. It’s hard to explain. And I train. I’ve been using the training room in Block B near my quarters.” He paused and then, rather than let silence set back in, asked, “What do you do?”

Hux didn’t answer for a moment, letting another enticing smoky breath go into the air. “Less exercise than I should,” he said.

“No, you--” Kylo began and then cut himself off, reddening.

Hux smiled at him like a loth-cat at a bird. “I mostly read and indulge in vices, like this,” he said, raising his cigarette to his mouth again.

“I used to read a lot,” Kylo said. Seeing Hux’s curious glance, he continued. “On Ach-To. I imagine you’ve worked that out already, that I was a student there...before Snoke. We had a small library. I made my way through it in a year.”

Hux pulled out his datapad, holding his cigarette between his lips while he lit the machine up and tapped at it. “There,” he mumbled to himself, and then put it away and withdrew the cigarette from his lips to speak uninhibited again. “I’ve amassed a bit of a library over the years. It’s digital. I don’t have the space for real books, I’m afraid. But it’s extensive. I’ve been collecting for awhile. You’re welcome to it.”

Kylo’s datapad chimed and he pulled it out, clicking the notification and staring in shock at the file Hux had just shared with him. There were thousands of digitized tomes loaded into it. His chest felt tight. “Thank you,” he said, voice unsteady.

Hux finished his cigarette and lit another, holding it to the flame and breathing in until this one burned bright too. He waved dismissively at Kylo. “I hope our business will be finished here sooner rather than later,” he said, “I long to see my new ship. But in the meantime, those should keep you busy.”

Kylo continued to scroll through Hux’s library, afraid to meet his gaze. Afraid that Hux would see the depth of emotion he was feeling even without the use of the Force. “Alderaanian mythology?” Kylo asked aloud, having come upon an entire series of volumes on the subject. His heart beat hard at the sight of those books. Kylo, in his past life, had possessed an obsession with his mother’s destroyed homeworld, even naming his first ship _Grimtaash_ , after the spirit that was said to protect the royal house Organa from corruption or betrayal.

“Oh,” Hux said, slightly abashed. It didn’t suit him. “Yes. A bit of contraband, that. Despise me if you dare.”

Kylo met his eyes at last. “I don’t dare.” They shared a long look, faces half-lit by gray dusk and half by the red of the hall through the archway, and the entire base might have been overrun in that moment by H-19’s risen dead, and neither of them would have noticed until they were wrenched apart by rotting hands.

Hux breathed out long and slow, and smiled. “If you share a love of Hosnian smoke, we may have quite a bit to talk about after all.”

“I haven’t smoked,” Kylo admitted, feeling once again that Hux had lived, in these small things, more deeply than himself, an idea that warred with his training which had professed that Force users experienced more of the galaxy than Force-nulls ever could.

“If you’d like to,” Hux offered, edging closer until they stood elbow-to-elbow.

“Yes,” Kylo answered at once, thinking _yes to anything more you offer me, yes to all of it_.

Hux gently but firmly took Kylo’s jaw in his free hand. He was ungloved tonight, and his hands were slightly chilled by the weather. His thumb came up to trace Kylo’s lower lip. Kylo trembled, and exhaled shakily against the pad of Hux’s thumb. Hux brought up the cigarette with his other hand, his thumb moving to the corner of Kylo’s mouth, and instructed, “Take a small breath, not a big one, and don’t hold it in your lungs.”

Kylo did as he was told, and the acrid smoke made his eyes water, but he managed to exhale it without coughing. At once he felt a buzzing in the base of his skull. He felt that it dulled his perception, trapped him in the much smaller space that he inhabited without the full use of his mind’s abilities. It wasn’t a feeling he liked, but as long as this space contained Hux and Hux was looking at him like _that_ , he could abide it.

“How do you find it?” Hux asked.

“I find it more enjoyable to watch you,” Kylo said before he’d thought it through, but Hux’s eyes were bright.

“Then you may watch me finish this one. I’m not wasting good tabac on you.”

Kylo took him up on that offer, finding himself mesmerized. He chanced reaching out again and found Hux’s mind still pleasantly buzzed. “I didn’t grow up with Empire Day parties.” Kylo said.

“No, I imagine not,” Hux answered. “You had Life Day instead?”

“Yes. There were always these big parades on Chandrila. Mom would give a speech. I stayed with my dad...he’d usually find a way to get us into trouble, piss her off. What was Empire Day like?”

“Oh, nothing to write home about,” Hux mused. “We’d watch an old transmission of the Emperor, the one Vader cast down all those years ago, although the holofeeds they recycled were from before then when he still looked human. My father would invite all his friends over and they’d drink and curse their lot in life. A real charming crowd.” He spat the last like it was acid in his mouth.

“You don’t like Imperials. Isn’t that unusual for a First Order man?”

“Oh, you’ll find an even split if you go asking. And if you get the truth out of people. The First Order,” and here Hux’s eyes glowed with more than just the light of his cigarette, “will surpass the Empire. We’ll cast off their failings and rise up greater than the Imperials ever dreamed. I’ll see to it.” And then Hux turned to Kylo, his pale eyes seeming to look straight through him as they sometimes did. “Why are you here? Just because Snoke wills it?”

Kylo considered that carefully. “I’m here on this planet because Snoke has sent me here. To be with you. I won’t pretend he shares all his designs with me. He’s thrown his lot in with your Order.”

Hux inhaled and exhaled smoke again, not even blinking at Kylo. “But why are _you_ here?”

“I want to do what Darth Vader could not,” Kylo said. “My grandfather...my uncle brought him low before he could realize his destiny. He was born to bring balance to the Force...that destiny falls on me now.”

“Ah. Space wizardry,” Hux said, laughing to himself.

“You have no faith,” Kylo observed without venom.

“Faith is useless,” Hux said, equally calm. “What comes to pass does so by the effort of men, not of the Force." He leaned close again and pointed toward the shadowy form of Krennic Park in the fir trees. “What do you see there?”

“A grave,” said Kylo.

“Look again.”

Kylo did, reaching out with the Force. He gasped when he found what he sought. “It was a Temple before. The Order razed it.”

“There was no one left to complain,” Hux said lightly. “But you didn’t know, did you? Before I told you. Your Force didn’t, _I did_ . A buried temple with no gods, that’s what’s there in those woods. _Empty_. Just like me.”

“You aren’t empty.” Kylo said. It was true. Hux burned with something. He was brimming over with it like the gutters brimmed with rain now, overflowing. But Kylo couldn’t quite catch sight of it. It concealed itself, slipping by behind the veneer like a loth-cat through long grass.

Hux didn’t address that. Instead he said, “We’ll go tomorrow to the secondary base beyond the lake country. Hunt’s Ford, it’s called. Allegiant General Pryde is meeting us there. It’s his preferred location on this planet. He has information for us, and I imagine he’ll put on a show too. Have you yet met an old Imperial?” Kylo said that he hadn’t. “Hm. Well, you’ll understand me better afterward. I do think you’ll find him as distasteful as I do.”

“We’ll journey there together?”

“Yes, by speeder. The amount of ore in the lake country confounds the navigation systems in shuttles. This rain will have softened the earth, there may be an increase in Stricken on the road.”

“Another chance to fight side by side,” Kylo said, and Hux grinned at him.

  
  


It was refreshing to skim along the surface of the roads in the shining silver speeder Hux had requested for their outing. They made good time through the forested lands around the base and would no doubt reach the lake country by sunset, and so Hux wasn’t opposed to stopping whenever they encountered a larger group of Stricken to dispatch them.

“Less to find their way into one of our quarries,” he had reasoned the first time he pulled the speeder over to the side of the road and coasted to a stop. Hux and Kylo found quickly that they made a good team, Kylo vaulting himself over the side of the speeder and cutting down infected left and right while Hux sat up on the back of it and picked off any of the ghouls that got too close to Kylo’s back or sides with his blaster.

Past noon they came upon the remnants of a settlement, and Hux slowed their craft to observe it as it passed them by. It was made up of squat stone buildings crawling with moss and ivy. Not a Stricken in sight, at least outside of the molding structures.

“Wait,” Kylo said, and Hux stopped the speeder without questioning him over it. Kylo hopped out and jogged toward one of the structures, marked with a sigil that he had recognized at once. It was another Temple. Kylo approached the door and hesitated before pushing it inward, turning back to look at Hux.

Hux disembarked from the speeder with an obliging roll of his eyes and followed after Kylo, his blaster ready. Kylo pushed open the temple doors and entered the gloom. It was situated like all Temples of similar size, with stone benches in rows leading down an incline to an altar and scattered skylights providing the only illumination. The transparisteel had long ago been knocked out of them. It took a while for his eyes to adjust, the only thing visible to him being the ray of sunlight slanting down onto the altar from the strategically placed opening in the roof. The smell of death permeated the place, but it was a dry smell here. Aged.

Finally Kylo’s eyes focused on the shadows. Every seat in the temple was filled. Worshippers young and old were crowded together, some seats filled with three or four younglings sitting atop each other. Kylo walked down the tilted aisle toward the altar, looking around at the crowd. Each and every one of them had their skull split open along the top, the contents vanished. Long since turned to dust.

Kylo recognized the work of a saber -- the clean lines and burnt edges left in their skulls from a kyber blade. These disciples had been given to the Force by their Master rather than risking themselves in the blight.

“Pfassking hell,” Hux hissed behind him, his eyes having adjusted as well. “You religious types are real pieces of work.”

Kylo walked to the altar as if pulled there. In the dark silence of the Temple, it whispered to him. He felt around the stone table until he found the crevice he knew would be there, and pulled the lever within. The back wall of the dais slid open, raining dust down.

“Ren,” Hux spoke again, from halfway down the aisle. “Do you need anything here?”

“We’ve got time, don’t we?” Kylo said without looking at him, approaching the sleeping quarters of the Master, also long-abandoned. The saber that had been used to kill his disciples was there, powered down on his desk. So where was his corpse? Kylo walked to the desk and ran his fingers over the tomes there, and then across the Jedi calligraphy pen laid to the side of them. He had loved his calligraphy work on Ach-To, and missed it dearly even now, though he was careful to hide that from Snoke. Kylo picked up the pen and held it up, studying it. It was in good repair. He put it in one of his robe pockets.

Hux spoke up again from the aisle, having not moved forward at all. “Great. I’m so glad we came in here so that you could get a writing utensi-- _ACK!_ ”

Kylo whipped around, looking for Hux and thinking for a split second the man had vanished, before he realized Hux had been dragged to the floor by his ankles. Here was the Master, clad in his decaying robes still, his flesh gray and wrinkled with decomposition, his eyes gone and his teeth exposed. He’d had bionic legs in life and they were useless to his dead flesh now, a weight dragging behind him as he propelled himself forward with clawed hands. His white hair hung in patchy strings from his flaking scalp, skull showing through in multiple places. The Stricken that had once led this Temple had a firm grip on Hux’s legs and was currently crawling up them with startling speed, zoned in on Hux’s stomach as a more appetizing target than his calves. The infected Master screeched, a deafening sound in the echoing stone Temple.

Hux brought his blaster up to aim it and the Stricken’s jerking lunge pushed his arm off course and knocked the weapon from his gasp. The plasma bolt fired into the ceiling instead, absorbed harmlessly by the stone. Hux’s blaster clattered down the slanted floor, out of his reach. Hux grabbed at the thing’s head with both his hands, holding it up and away from him. It snapped its teeth at him in rapid, sharp clicks, wiggling in his grasp. “ _REN!_ ” Hux screamed.

Kylo leapt forward, igniting his saber and cutting the Master in half with it. Free of the weight of the metal legs, the creature was faster. It dragged itself up Hux’s body, leaving black slime along his uniform, and snapped again at his face. Kylo drove his saber down through its skull, stopping the point of his blade just before it pierced Hux as well. Kylo used his saber to pull the Master to the side and dispose of what remained of him.

Hux was taking high, whistling breaths, laying still on the floor, staring up blankly. Kylo powered down his saber and hauled Hux up so that he was sitting. “Did it bite you? Scratch you?” He asked urgently.

Hux shakily patted his gloved hands along his face and neck and then pulled his uniform sleeves up to examine the pale skin of his wrists. “I don’t think…” Hux bent one of his knees and then paused, letting out a choked sound. “Kylo,” he whispered. His voice bled terror.

Kylo adjusted himself so that he was holding Hux’s back to his chest, pulling him close, and said, “Your leg?”

“Right above my boot, it grabbed me…”

“Bend your leg more, I can’t reach.”

Hux bent his knee up against his chest and Kylo reached forward, letting Hux lean his head back across one of Kylo’s shoulders and look away from himself as Kylo pulled the leg of his uniform up and out of the top of his boot, exposing that flesh as well. The back of his leg was bloody, and Kylo released a shaking breath. Hux made a sound next to his ear that was part laugh and part sob.

“I’m hurt, I can feel it,” he said. “Shit. _Shit_.”

“Let me, I can’t see…” Kylo said, and Hux lifted his calf out in front of him, letting Kylo reach out to manipulate it this way and that. There was a cut there, but… “It’s not a scratch,” Kylo said.

“ _What?_ ” Hux lifted his head at once from Kylo’s shoulder, looking for himself, and finding a piece of transparisteel from the skylights above buried in his skin. He picked it out and stood up, holding the bloody transparent shard in front of his face like it was a rare artifact of some sort. “By the thousand tides…” he said, relief evident in his voice. “Where’s my blaster?” Kylo summoned it for him and handed it over, and Hux fired two rounds into the dead Master’s skull, reducing it to paste. Then he turned on his heel and walked back out into the bright day, cursing under his breath.

When Kylo emerged he found Hux digging around in the back of the speeder, pulling out the spare uniform he’d brought. Hux stripped himself and redressed without self-consciousness, and Kylo averted his eyes. The old uniform was discarded in the dust of the road. Hux started to make his way around to the driver’s side, but he was still shaking.

“Let me,” Kylo said.

“We need to make up time.”

“I’m a pilot. I’ll get us there. Hux, let me.”

Hux relented and collapsed into the passenger seat bonelessly. Kylo slid into the driver’s seat and adjusted the controls to his liking before switching the speeder on. “The Master killed his followers but couldn’t kill himself,” Kylo said before they moved. He needed to say it aloud. He’d been thinking about it ever since he discovered the saber separate from a corpse.

“When a Jedi falls short of their meaningless tenets it never fails to make _my_ life harder,” Hux said drily.

In the heat of the day, away from the nightmare they’d just witnessed, the simple annoyance on Hux’s face made Kylo laugh. He tried to cut it short as Hux’s eyes swiveled towards him and only succeeded in snorting loudly. And then Hux was laughing too. They laughed like madmen under the sun together, the forest verdant around them and the sky blue above.

When at last he’d recovered enough to pilot their speeder, feeling light and happy, Kylo punched it. He pushed the speeder to its limits, the forest on either side of the road passing behind them so quickly it looked like a solid wall. When they shot out from the woods and over the glittering surface of the scattered lakes there was still light in the sky. They would make their deadline after all. Hux had initially shouted about their speed, but his voice was lost to the engine and the wind, and he’d resigned himself to sitting back in his seat, face pale. His demeanor improved once they were in open lake country at least, instead of the twisting forest roads.

  
  


Hunt’s Ford was a dramatically different settlement than H-Base. Instead of a simply-constructed durasteel structure, it was a commandeered manse on the edge of one of the large lakes. True to word, their speeder flitted over a ford to get there, tossing up a spray of the shallow water into the light of the setting sun. Ren parked it out front on the flagstone drive, and as soon as he cut the engine Hux was cursing at him.

“You’re a madman. Do you know that?” Hux snapped. “You almost killed us again a hundred times over in the last mile and half!”

“We were never in danger. The Force allows me to perceive--”

“Shut up about the bloody Force.” Hux hopped out of the speeder, irate. Kylo bit back his surfacing laughter, knowing it would do him no favors with Hux now that the man's euphoria at surviving his encounter in the Temple had faded.

Allegiant General Pryde met them at the tall wooden door inlaid with gold patterns, and the difference between himself and Hux was readily apparent. Where Hux’s uniform was plain black, Pryde’s was the old Imperial gray and still decorated with clinking medals from the wars of old. Pryde himself was a graying man with an ingratiating expression on his face that didn’t reach his lifeless blue eyes.

“General Hux!” He greeted Hux immediately, with a wide smile. “And…?”

“This is Lord Ren,” Hux told him, “my co-commander.”

“Ah, yes. I’d heard. Welcome, both of you, to Hunt’s Ford,” Pryde said, waving one of his hands with a flourish. “The staff will show you to your rooms. I imagine you’d like to freshen up before dinner.”

The inside of the estate was just as lavish as the exterior, with plush fabrics in every color of the rainbow covering the furnishings, golden accents everywhere, and marble floors that their bootheels clicked on.

Servants in uniforms led Hux and Kylo upstairs to rooms across from each other and welcomed them to choose for themselves. Hux ducked into one without any consideration, and Kylo entered the other. It was a lush chamber outfitted in deep purple. The drapes around the four-poster bed sparkled with hanging precious jewels. Kylo went to the refresher and splashed water on his face out of the basin, which was hewn from a huge slab of shimmering purple stone. The opulence of this place was suffocating, reminiscent of the Old Republic and the richest of the Imperials. Kylo knew that Allegiant General Pryde’s insistence on meeting them here instead of coming to H-Base alone would be enough to make Hux despise the man.

When it was time for dinner, Kylo made his way back down to the first floor and through various rooms cluttered with finery, until he found the dining room. It had vaulted ceilings painted like a summer sky, and the walls were pasted with gold leaf that glowed even in the dim light of the evening. There was a long table set with a white tablecloth and decanters of golden wine.

Hux was seated already, having taken the seat all the way across the table from Pryde. Kylo took the seat at Hux’s right hand.

Pryde cleared his throat across the distance, and snapped for the servers to come round. They brought out the evening’s fare: fresh greens and discs of fried soft cheese. Kylo picked up his flatware -- also gold, which he snorted at, and tucked in, uncaring of any rules there might be. This seemed like a place with rules.

Hux waited for a server to pour him a glass of the fragrant golden wine. Once he’d swirled and tasted it, he said, “What news from abroad, then?”

“You’ll be pleased,” Pride said. “I come bearing news of your ship.”

Hux’s eyes did light up at that. “She’s finished?”

“Oh, yes. And quite a remarkable machine she is.”

For a while Hux and Pryde conversed politely, much of the terminology unfamiliar to Kylo. But Hux did seem pleased. He even smiled, and partook in the toast that Pryde offered to the success of the First Order.

Pryde asked about the mining efforts and Hux relayed in broad terms the challenges his troopers had faced. Pryde wondered aloud if clone troopers would have fared better, which soured Hux’s good mood.

After dinner the three of them moved to the pink-upholstered sunroom at the back of the estate, gazing out wide windows onto the water of the lake, gone purple with the deep evening light. Pryde pulled a different decanter out from a cabinet and held it up, to which Hux nodded.

“Please, take your seats,” Pryde said, rummaging around for glasses.

Hux sat in one of the plush round chairs before a transparisteel table, and this time Kylo chose the seat opposite him, leaving the middle one open for Pryde, which made Hux’s face tight. He openly loathed close proximity with the man, Kylo saw. Pryde set three glasses down on the table and poured them each two fingers of amber liquid that smelled strongly of spices.

“Corellian brandy,” Hux told Kylo. “Will you?”

“No--” Kylo began, and Pryde cut him off.

“Of course he will.” Pryde firmly sat one of the glasses in front of Kylo. Once Pryde was settled in his chair and had downed half his serving of brandy, he cheerfully asked Hux as though Kylo were not present, “How are you finding your new _co-commander_ , then?”

Hux looked across the table at Kylo and said, “I find Lord Ren a stimulating presence here on H-19, though I can’t vouch for his temper.”

Pryde, smiling his wide smile that didn’t reach his eyes, turned to Kylo and said, “For shame, Hux! But I’m sure young Lord Ren here can return the dig. What have you to say about our own General Hux? What are his defects?”

Kylo shook his head. “On the contrary. I am convinced that General Hux has no defect.”

“I have faults enough,” Hux said, giving Pryde a sly look, “I’ve taken many lives for offenses which didn’t warrant it. Indeed they may have been trifles to other men.” Pryde had no immediate response to that, considering Hux carefully in return, his smile vanished.

Kylo spoke up, “If so, you’ve chosen your fault well. It’s one I share.” Pryde was beginning to look uncomfortable seated between them.

“There is, I believe,” Hux said, “a tendency toward particular evil in everyone. Yours is to hate everyone.”

“And yours,” Kylo returned, “is to think yourself above them.”

“Am I not?” Hux asked, his smile sharp. “You yourself said I have no defect.”

“Does the truth of it make it less of an evil?” Kylo asked.

“Two evils, then, between the two of us,” Hux stated. Something shimmered in the air between Hux and Kylo, something like the energy of a coming storm.

“Oh!” Pryde exclaimed. “But do let us retire! It’s quite late.” He stood at once and said his goodbyes, retreating from the room.

“We scared him off,” Hux observed.

“That must please you.”

“Yes,” Hux said, pouring himself another drink from the decanter. “It seems you do know the first thing about pleasing me. Would you like another taste of this?” Kylo stood suddenly, with such force that he almost upended his chair. “Is that a yes or a no?” Hux asked.

“Why do you say those things to me?” Kylo demanded.

“I should have thought that would be obvious,” Hux said, frozen with the decanter of brandy still tipped at an angle, having not yet set it down, “Even to you.”

Kylo felt his face shift against his will, overly expressive as it had always been. “Is it...is this idle, for you? What do you mean by it?”

“Are you asking me if I’m attracted to you?” Hux’s voice and face were incredulous.

“No!” Kylo cried, and stepped forward and then threw up his hands and took a half-step back. “I only...I know I’m not…” the words wouldn’t come, and he could not explain the great chasm he felt between their lives, though their current paths stretched before them side by side.

“You attract me a great deal more than I like,” Hux told him simply, setting down the bottle with a muted, final tap on the table.

Kylo was at a loss for words, and stood silently, staring at Hux as though he’d launched the decanter through the wide window before them and declared himself a blue bantha with wings.

“Well?” Hux prompted.

“Well,” Kylo said, and then surfacing again from his racing thoughts. “Well what?”

“Well, what are we to do about this?” At Kylo's blank look, Hux added, “I am attracted to you...forgive me if I’ve misunderstood you, but I believe that you are attracted to me. And you are outside the Order’s ranking, which leaves no professional barrier between us. So what are we to do, Kylo?”

Kylo’s skin felt hot. Hearing Hux’s voice say his name made his pulse race. He grasped at words and finally found them. “There’s a barrier.”

“Oh? What?”

“I can’t...attachments are...frowned on.” Kylo choked out, his stomach sinking as Hux’s face shuttered. It was true; attachments were not encouraged under Jedi teaching or Sith. Passion was the root of Dark power and Kylo had been encouraged to act on most of his desires, to take what he wanted. But the arena of attraction, of sex, was still untouched. Sex itself was not the issue. Vulnerability was. Lovers were so often a weakness. Even now looking at Hux, Kylo felt in himself the inability to act on his attraction without forming an attachment. Weak.

“I apologize, Lord Ren,” Hux said stiffly, “for wasting your time.”

Kylo looked at Hux, at this closed-off expression so similar to the one he’d worn when they’d first met, when Kylo had misstepped the first time, and he felt tears welling in his eyes. Shame burned him. No, he couldn’t cry like a child, especially not in front of Hux. Kylo turned and left with only a nod. Safe in his own borrowed room, huddled in his own bed, he let himself sob into his sheets.

  
  


Kylo avoided Hux until dinner the following day, or perhaps Hux avoided him. They tiptoed around each other, refusing to enter rooms that the other inhabited. Meeting each other at last at the dinner table was unavoidable, though Hux avoided Kylo’s face. It seemed some measure of conversation, too, would be forced between them, as the staff were excruciatingly slow in bringing out any food.

At last Pryde said, “Lord Ren, if you would be so kind: could I call upon you to check what is keeping the kitchen staff? This is most unusual. And I require a private audience with General Hux in the course of this evening, for only a few minutes.”

“No,” Hux said at once, and his face was pale. “Excuse me, Allegiant General Pryde. You can have nothing to say to me that my co-commander need not hear. Ren, stay.”

Kylo, stalled in the act of happily leaving his seat, sank back down, looking between Hux’s drawn face and the frozen smile on Pryde’s.

“Very well,” Pryde said, and cleared his throat to begin, his attention focused on Hux as though Kylo were in fact absent. “Believe me, my dear boy, that your attempt at modesty adds to your suitability for what I ask of you. You would be less desirable in my eyes were there not this little unwillingness in you. However preoccupied you are in building the strength of the Order -- for which I earnestly applaud you -- surely you understand my intention. I come to you now with the design of having selected you for a husband.”

Kylo felt his eyes grow wide, and schooled his face back into something approaching neutrality with great effort.

“My reason for marrying is twofold: I wish to strengthen the bond between the old Empire and the First Order, and I believe it will add greatly to my personal happiness. I am not interested in obtaining a spouse who is not both refined and an active, useful sort of person. Your own talents, General, have attracted me to you. Though of course I will require you to retire them as part of your marital submission.”

“Not so fast,” Hux said. “I’ve made you no answer. Let me do it now. Accept my thanks for the compliment you’ve paid me with your proposal. However, it is impossible for me to do anything but decline it.”

“You’ll not fool an old man like me,” replied Pryde. “I know it’s usual with younger officers to reject the first proposals of their elders and betters when they secretly mean to accept. I’m by no means discouraged by what you’ve said, and I hope to lead you to the altar within the year.”

“I am perfectly serious in my refusal!” Hux cried. “You say that marriage would add to your happiness? I am convinced that I am the last man in the First Order who could make you happy, just as you could never make me so. You would find me in every respect ill-qualified for what you’re asking of me. I am a commander first and all else a man can be second, and I will be that until my last breath.”

“You weren’t born into this station,” Pryde said, and angry blotches of color bloomed high on Hux’s cheeks. “It’s not your place, despite Brendol’s generosity, and you’d do well to leave it.” Pryde’s gaze softened strangely. “It’s nearly possible to believe you Maratelle’s son rather than Brendol’s. I offer you an alternative that suits you.”

“I am _not_ Maratelle’s son,” Hux said, his voice colder than Kylo had heard it yet. “And I will not resign myself to your bed, _Allegiant General_ ,” he spat the title like a curse. “You’ve enjoyed a long and rich life. By refusing your hand I do all in my power to prevent your future being otherwise.”

Pryde’s face had shifted too now, the veneer of pleasantry cracking. “When I do you the honor of next speaking on this subject to you,” he told Hux, “I hope to receive a more favorable answer than you’ve given me now. Blast it, where are the staff?”

Hux checked the time on his datapad and then rose, drawing his blaster as he approached the door toward the kitchen. Kylo got up and followed him, saber hilt ready in his hand. Pryde made no move to join them.

They took the staircase down to the cellar kitchen, Hux in front of Kylo, and as they descended they heard the distinctive wet sounds of feasting Stricken. There were only two of them. They had both been adult males in life, and quite large ones, but the destruction they had wrought was immense.

Two cooks, a dozen servants, and four scullery maids lie dead on the floor. Kylo couldn’t begin to imagine how two Stricken had managed to kill all the people they had, even with the staff unarmed, but how they’d gotten in was obvious enough. A side door had been propped open to the night to relieve the heat of the kitchen.

“Shall I?” Kylo asked, the dead old and new swiveling their heads toward his voice. The Stricken abandoned their crouching posture where they had been digging into the bowels of one of the cooks, standing and lumbering forward.

Hux made no answer, staring ahead without moving. Kylo slid by him to take in his face and hardly recognized him. He seemed younger somehow. And sad. Hux hadn’t looked like this even as he’d overseen the cremation of his murdered officers back at H-Base. And he still did not meet Kylo’s eyes.

Kylo left him and moved forward, taking the heads of the Stricken as they reached for him, and then beheading the staff. When he reached the last of them, one of the maids, Hux stepped forward at last. Kylo paused.

Hux approached and looked down on the woman’s face as she reanimated, black veins surfacing in her skin. She wheezed, starting to breathe again, and opened her eyes. Hux drew and shot her between them. The blood in her skull mingled with the other viscera on the floor.

“Are you all right?” Kylo asked him.

Hux released a shuddering breath and answered with his face still downturned, “Yes. I am now.”

Pryde at last followed them down, and exclaimed at the sight. The meal -- a delightful array of roast fowl and greens with a fruit tart for dessert -- that the cooks had been preparing was now splattered with gore and unusable. “A shame, that is.” said Pryde. “This is quite enough disappointment for one evening, on my part. I’ll see the both of you tomorrow.” He turned with a grimace and quit the room.

“I’m not ready for bed,” Hux murmured. He stepped over three corpses to open the pantry and removed a round of bread and dish of soft butter. “There’s still wine on the table,” he said to Kylo without looking at him. “I’m taking it to the parlor, if you care to join me.” Kylo deactivated and stowed away his saber, and followed Hux’s lead, after picking up a jar of fruit jam from the counter and cleaning it off on his robe.

They installed themselves in the blue room just to the side of the grand entryway, leaving the lights off. Kylo scuffed his shoes on the steps up, cleaning them as much as he could, but Hux didn’t bother to clean the soles of his shoes at all, leaving red tracks up the stairs and across the whole of the house, and even on one of the pale blue ottomans where he put his feet up. Again, Kylo refused a drink, opting just for the bread and jam.

“Is that part of your training?” Hux asked as he opened the bottle of red wine he’d brought from the dining room. “Abstinence. From drink.” From attachments, he left unsaid except in his expression.

“No,” Kylo said, “but it dulls the senses.”

Hux laughed. “Quite right,” he said, lifting the bottle in its entirety and drinking deeply from it. He made a sour face. “Sweet. You’d like this, probably.” He drank again, head tipped back, his throat working as he swallowed, and didn’t stop until he’d downed more than half the bottle. Then, he looked at it in distaste and stood up to throw it down with his full strength. It shattered on the floor and left an impressive purple splatter on the white tile and across the blue furnishings. Hux released an uncharacteristic whoop at that, smiling wide, his lips purpled from the wine. “Tell me,” he said to Kylo.

“...What?”

“Tell me about your training. Were you alone? After?”

“No,” Kylo said, eyeing Hux cautiously. “The other Knights of Ren were with me. And Snoke of course.”

“Tell me how it was. Did you fear them, these knights?”

“No. They’re my brothers.”

Hux laughed, and it was a high and reedy sound. Unhinged.

“Did you fear the people you trained with?” Kylo asked him.

“They feared me,” Hux said, looking up toward the ceiling absently.

“You were always dangerous, then?”

Hux looked at Kylo finally, and Kylo felt a weight lifted from him. He’d missed having Hux’s eyes pointed at him, a realization that shocked him.

“What were you like?” Hux asked. “When you were young.”

Kylo searched for an answer. “I doubted myself more. You never did, did you?”

“Couldn’t afford to,” said Hux. “I’d have eaten you alive, Ren. I was the worst of them.”

“You still are.”

Hux laughed again, but his mania seemed to dissipate some and he stood more surely. “Thank you,” he said, low enough that Kylo wasn’t sure he’d said it at all.

  
  


Their last morning at Hunt’s Ford, a gray but dry one, Pryde invited them to spar with six of his personal guards for entertainment. “Of course, Lord Ren, I ask you to refrain from the use of the Force.”

They installed themselves for the duels in the courtyard out front, on the flagstones beside the long reflecting pool. Pryde’s six guards readied themselves on one end of the pool, striking in their charcoal trooper armor. On each side there was a rack of weapons to choose from, both vibro-swords and blasters.

Kylo went first, against three of the guards. He inquired as to whether the use of his saber would be considered unfair, and Pryde allowed him to have it. He lunged for the guards as soon as Pryde gave the signal, and cut them down with broad sweeps of his crackling blade, leaving their charred and smoking forms beneath him.

“Utterly savage,” Pryde commented to Hux on the sidelines.

“Yes,” Hux agreed. “And beautiful, too.” Pryde had nothing to say to that. Kylo hoped he hadn’t colored at the praise any more than could be explained by exercise. He trotted to take Hux’s place on the sidelines as the next three guards prepared for their duel, having already begun priming blasters.

Hux stalked forward to his place, removed his black uniform coat, and hung it on the weapons rack, revealing a crisp white undershirt which he rolled up the sleeves to. He selected a blue vibro-sword rather than one of the blasters.

“I’d encourage you to take this seriously,” Pryde called to him. “Are you not a marksman? My guards will show you no mercy in the event of your failure.”

“Nor I they, Allegiant General,” Hux quipped, sinking into a ready stance with the blade held out in front of him. The guards across the courtyard put away the plasma weapons they had selected. The first replaced his blaster with another vibro-sword, the next with a staff, and the final one kept a ranged weapon with the selection of two throwing-blades. They took their stances as well, and Pryde raised his hand to give the signal.

“If you are sure, General,” he prompted again. “My men are expertly trained in all forms of combat, you know.”

“If my fighting is inferior,” said Hux, “you will be spared the boredom of watching it for long.”

Pryde snapped his fingers, and the guards attacked.

Hux met them with the same ferocity, swiping the first throwing-blade the furthest guard launched at him aside with a ringing parry. The first of the guards to reach Hux, the one with the staff, swung for him ruthlessly. Hux dodged the staff, ducking below it and cutting the guard across the leg. The guard cried out and dropped his weapon, clutching his thigh. Hux struck again, cleaving off the man’s arms and the leg they held, and then fluidly swung his sword up to meet the blade of the second guard. Hux caught the guard’s sword on his crossguard and forced him back, twisting his blade around in a tight circle and flinging the guard’s weapon away. It clattered to the flagstones on the other side of the pool. Unarmed, the guard staggered back, but not out of Hux’s range. Hux slashed him across his belly, cutting through the plates of his plastisteel armor and spilling his intestines. His innards slipped from beneath his chest plate like greased ropes, faster than he could shove them back in. The last guard hung back, unwilling to lose his final throwing-blade without a clear shot. Hux, however, was more confident in his aim. He launched his vibro-sword and it hit it’s mark, piercing the guard’s sternum and skewering him through. He fell to his knees.

Hux approached and disarmed his opponent, taking the man’s last knife in his own hand. He unclasped the guard’s armor with the other and let it fall free, and then stabbed the knife through the man’s black undershirt into his torso just under the left of his ribs, making a wide and dripping incision. Hux knelt, reaching his arm up into the man’s chest cavity as he gurgled through his helmet. Having found what he sought, Hux wrenched his arm out.

He held the still-beating heart of the guard. The pulses of the organ slowed and stopped under Hux’s watchful gaze, and then he brought it to his mouth and took a bite, letting gore run down his chin and onto his shirt. Kylo felt his own pulse quicken at the sight of that, and he was suddenly dizzy enough he worried vaguely he might lose his balance and stumble. He knew his mouth had fallen open and was powerless to correct it. He was doomed, he thought. If Hux asked Kylo again in this moment to enter into a relationship Kylo would be unable to hold himself back. Kylo cursed himself for having turned Hux away before, looking now at all that might have been his.

Hux returned to the sidelines and offered the heart to Pryde, holding it out, the crimson blood vibrant against his pale skin and shirt, challenged only by the color of his hair. Pryde blanched, going an alarming shade of green.

“No,” Pryde said, swallowing roughly. “Thank you.”

“You’ve done this before,” Kylo realized, watching Hux’s practiced movements as he tore a second chunk out, glaring at Pryde the whole while. Hux turned to acknowledge Kylo as he chewed, the disdain on his face mellowing.

“Captain Phasma turned me on to it and I found it pleases me. I’ve tasted many hearts during my various planetary details and until now was denied the opportunity on this one.” He glanced back at Pryde. “It surprises me to find the heart of your guard so tender, Allegiant General.” Hux punctuated his statement with a third bite, and the crunch of the muscle seemed too much for Pryde. He excused himself, looking very much as though he were about to vomit.

Once Pryde was gone, Kylo spoke again. “You fought well. I didn’t know you practiced swordplay.”

“Not as extensively as shooting,” Hux said, “but I’m sure that any of the blasters set out for me on that rack would have misfired.” Kylo’s face darkened. He hadn’t considered it. “Here,” Hux held the heart out to Kylo.

Kylo hesitated.

“I won’t think less of you if you don’t,” Hux told him quietly. Kylo looked at the blood streaming down Hux’s mouth and neck, staining his white shirt and covering his hand, running down his forearm in rivulets.

“I want to,” Kylo said.

Hux twisted his hand to present Kylo with the other side of the organ, his clean hand cupping Kylo’s jaw just as he had when he guided him in smoking, “Here, you see the dark muscle here? Avoid the lighter part, it’s too stringy.” He coaxed Kylo forward and brought the heart up to his lips.

And then, to Kylo’s amazement, Hux leaned forward too, nearly brushing his nose against Kylo’s as he prepared to take another bite at the same time. Kylo bit down where he’d been directed to and blood filled his mouth, running out of it and down his front just as it had for Hux. He was submerged in the taste and smell of iron, and swallowed a full gulp of warm blood. It would have been hot when Hux did it the first time, Kylo thought, not merely warm. It was already cooling in the morning air. Kylo finished the bite he’d started, tearing the piece of muscle free and chewing it. Hux finished his as well, that side of the heart now consumed wholly. They chewed in sync, and Kylo swallowed when Hux did.

“Well?” Hux said at last, smiling a bloody smile at Kylo.

“Better than the cigarette,” Kylo said.

Hux laughed. “I think so too.” He studied the remnants of the heart in his hand and then tossed it into the long reflecting pool, marring the surface. “That’s enough mischief, though. If I do say so myself. We should be off.”

When at last they were cleaned and ready to leave, Allegiant General Pryde reappeared to bid them goodbye. The man did not renew his offer to Hux as he had promised to. Instead he said, “There will come a day, General Hux, where you are under my command. You will regret your actions here.”

Hux didn’t dignify Pryde’s threat with a response, instead walking away to the speeder. Kylo trailed after him.

“I want to drive again,” Kylo said once they were out of Pryde’s earshot.

“Absolutely not, you’ll kill us.”

“I didn’t last time.”

“Must have just been lucky.” Hux took the driver’s side, scarcely waiting on Kylo to settle himself in the passenger seat before revving the engine and propelling the speeder forward.

  
  


As they zipped along, having just left the lake country behind, the speeder’s console blinked indicating a call. Hux answered it, slowing to hear the speaker over the engine. Mitaka informed them that one of the mining transports had gone missing on its route near to their location, and Hux turned the speeder off its course to check out the situation.

Hux and Kylo disembarked from the speeder at the last known point of the transport, drawing their weapons at the overpowering scent of death. Hux motioned silently to the patterns on the sandy road left by the transport’s whirring lifters, and to the area where they veered off into the woods. Branches were broken there as well, indicating the transport’s altered path. Kylo nodded, and they advanced quietly together.

The road ended in a wooded ravine, and the missing transport was just below, it’s volatile blue ore leaking out and forming a pool in which several Stricken were partially dissolved. This transport had been one of the sort that troopers rode on as well, and the two that had manned it were reduced to twisted red and white forms. One of them had been torn out of their helmet and an infected was currently happily scooping the gray matter from their head. The other trooper had retained their helmet and therefore their brain, and already reanimated themselves, twisting around and hissing through their vocoder.

Hux looked down on the scene in distaste. “RK-7053. I told him often that he must take the transport process more seriously. He was prone to leaving his blaster holstered. Now look.”

Hux’s voice drew the attention of the Stricken in the ravine and they struggled toward the road, shrieking and losing pieces of themselves along the way to the corrosive ore. Hux drew his lighter out of his pocket and clicked it open, locking it so that the flame was continuous, and then threw it into the ravine. The pool of ore and the transport itself quickly went up in flame. The infected flailed about, wailing as they cooked.

Kylo tore his eyes away from the scene, looking instead at the way the flames lit Hux’s face. Hux returned the look. “Let them have a taste of eternity,” he said. In his eyes there was darkness… a sort of absence. His soul had taken leave, and all the scant warmth his face was capable of had gone with it. Hux’s face was momentarily that of a monster. Within seconds the look faded back within him and his broader self came back out. Kylo realized what it was that Hux brimmed over with, the quality that he had struggled to see before now. It was deep rage. Rage as profound as Kylo’s, but handled differently. Honed differently. Hux wielded his rage not as a battering ram but as a dagger in the dark.

Kylo felt again that he was in danger of toppling to the side, that his balance had been knocked off-kilter, and he fumbled for it, feeling hopelessly overcome with infatuation. Hux stared into his face and then pulled away with a harsh breath, walking back toward the speeder.

“Hux,” Kylo called. “Hux wait.” He ran after him and grabbed Hux by the shoulder, turning him around.

“Stop,” Hux snapped. “Stop that.”

“What?” Kylo asked, uncomprehending, only desperate to continue to observe Hux.

“If there were any insult in you refusing my attention it would be forgiven as we must work together, but by the stars above you cannot _look at me like this!_ ” Hux cried, stepping forward into Kylo’s space with such vehemence that Kylo nearly expected to be struck.

“I’m only looking at you--”

“No, no you look at me as though you’re undressing me. Worse, as though you’re skinning me. I can’t stand it. Your eyes--” Hux cut himself off and then grumbled. “Might as well put the bucket back on. It’s better than seeing your face and knowing I can’t have you.”

“My face?”

“Yes! Your infuriating, intractable, irresistible face. Kriff, you’re lovely--” Hux said, then went silent as Kylo grabbed his shoulders roughly in his big hands and yanked him yet closer, close enough that their breath played across each other’s faces. Kylo’s lips were parted, his eyebrows drawn low, his expression somewhere between intense pain and intense desire. Hux licked his lips, and noticed the way Kylo watched him do it. Hux caught Kylo’s gaze again, those fine dark eyes burning into his, and told him roughly, “Come on, then.”

Kylo obeyed. He grabbed Hux’s face in his gloved hands and kissed him deeply. He’d never kissed anyone before, but he’d seen it done, and Hux was, as in most things, a valuable partner. Hux kissed him back, and he kissed in such a way as to learn what Kylo liked. Ever the strategist. He was figuring it out faster than Kylo was, reacting to his little gasps and shivers. Hux sucked on Kylo’s bottom lip and then lightly grazed it with his teeth, and Kylo moaned. Hux broke away to curse against Kylo’s mouth. Hux’s hands found Kylo’s jaw in a mirror of Kylo’s hands on him before he leaned back in. Kylo felt that Hux had thrice the effect on his mind that smoke or drink did. He was dizzy, disoriented. Consumed. In the midst of their kisses Kylo realized that the trap of attachment he’d feared had already been sprung and it was too late to wrench himself free from it without bleeding out. He drank Hux in, committing the taste of him to memory, and Kylo’s visions of his future, his destiny, were wed to Hux’s breath as it shuddered against Kylo’s lips. Kylo Ren was no longer free, no longer above the snares that had destroyed his grandfather before him.

Hux’s datapad pinged and they broke apart, breathing hard. “Probably wanting to know our status,” Hux said. His lips were kiss-reddened and his cheeks flushed, his green eyes hazy. He looked thoroughly debauched. Kylo unconsciously put a hand over his chest. His heart was hammering and his stomach felt as though the earth had dropped out from under him. Kylo’s full grasp on the Force returned, a missing sense coming back to him, and as he looked at Hux he realized that Hux could not possibly understand what that was like for him. Hux had not been made vulnerable in the same way, and Kylo hated him for it. He felt the rabid fear wash over him that Jedi and Sith before him had felt over centuries, knowing that the weight of this thing between himself and Hux was not split evenly. That Hux had more power in this than Kylo did -- the power to forsake Kylo, when doing the same would shatter Kylo like driving his fist into his fresher mirror.

 _If he ever does pull away, I’ll force the breath from his lungs_ , Kylo thought.

Hux observed him through these thoughts as they played darkly across his face, and asked, “What is it?”

Kylo couldn’t begin to explain this fear to Hux, not wanting to tip even more power into his hands and knowing he’d be dissatisfied if he tried, so instead he said, “I want you.”

“This is madness,” Hux laughed. “Stars above.” His hands found Kylo’s shoulders, resting there. “We should return,” he said, but instead leaned in for more, giving Kylo one last kiss, softer and sweeter than the others. Every particle in Kylo’s body screamed for him to possess Hux as fully as he could. They returned to the speeder together, and this time Kylo went to the passenger seat without a quarrel, already dreaming of wrapping his arms again around Hux’s thin waist at the first opportunity. He’d dig fingers in hard enough to bruise.

  
  


Hux smiled to himself when his door chimed, knowing it could be no one but Kylo Ren requesting his company at this hour, just as he had done every night for the past half a month. In all that time they’d never progressed past feverish kisses. When Hux’s hands roamed too much Kylo moved them back to his chest or his shoulders, and really Hux couldn’t complain -- Kylo Ren had a particularly nice chest and shoulders. Hux hadn’t pushed overmuch, sensing inexperience in Kylo, but of late Kylo had seemed on the precipice of something, and Hux was eager to see where it would lead them. He let the Knight in, already moving to set out cards and his chess board in case either drew Kylo’s fancy tonight, but Kylo’s appearance stopped him short.

“Ren? What’s happened?” Hux asked, taking in Kylo’s pale, sweaty face within the black void of his hair and robes, and his rigid, nervous posture.

“Are you well?” Kylo asked.

“Yes,” Hux was further taken aback at the inquiry after his health. “Yes, very well. Ren, are you--”

Kylo moved forward, taking his usual seat and then abruptly getting up again and pacing the room. Hux stared at him, torn between amusement and anxiety at Kylo’s apparent agitation. He made another circuit of his path through the center of the room and then turned, approaching Hux and meeting his face at last. Kylo took a deep breath and released it, his dark eyes boring into Hux with trepidation, and began.

“I struggled against this in vain, Hux,” Kylo said, his voice raw. “I can’t repress the way I feel...please, let me tell you how much I admire and love you.” Hux stared at him, face coloring. Red creeped up from his collar as well. He was silent, his face soft and wondering, a dreamer’s smile starting to raise the corners of his mouth. Kylo took Hux’s silence as tacit agreement, and forged on. “The moment I kissed you I married my heart to you. If you’ll have me for a husband…”

“No,” Hux said at once, all gentleness chased out of his expression by bitterness. “I don’t desire a marriage. If you make me an offer you’ll have given it to me unwanted.” All at once he was himself just as agitated as Kylo, his shoulders stiffening, his eyes sharp and cold.

“Hux--”

“I love you against my will,” Hux cried, “Against all reason and against my character. I have every reason to dislike you. You come to me, insult me, invade me, take from me half the power of my station on behalf of a shrouded financier. You haunt my halls, _my dreams_. You turned me down on my original offer of deepening our relationship and then went back on it in my vulnerability, and now this? Now, marriage? You dare not, you cannot deny any of it.”

Kylo stepped forward, reaching out to Hux, and Hux scrambled back until he was cornered against his desk. He swung at Kylo and Kylo grabbed his arm, holding him fast, moving in until they were chest to chest. “Hux,” he said again, a tear running down his cheek despite his best efforts to quell the emotion rising in his throat. “Armitage, you can’t refuse me.” The choking fear was rising in him again, the knowledge that Hux could leave him broken at any time, the need to claim and own beyond what was possible. In the past weeks Kylo had grasped at all possible avenues of ownership over Hux as his means of saving himself. He had landed on and then clutched to the idea of marriage as a man trapped within a raging river clutches a lifeline. Kylo hauled Hux up onto the desk and pushed him back, clasping his wrists above his head and kissing him feverishly.

For a moment, Hux was frozen, still as a statue beneath him, and then he returned Kylo’s passion. He kissed back with equal ferocity, flicking his tongue into Kylo’s mouth, tugging his wrists loose in Kylo’s grip to open his palms against Kylo’s hands, and raising his legs up to bracket Kylo’s hips. Kylo moaned appreciatively at that, pressing his groin against Hux’s, feeling himself stir inside his leggings. Then the breath was knocked out of him. He found himself on his back on the floor, wheezing. Hux had kicked him, he realized. He’d gotten a leg up high enough to press the sole of his boot into Kylo’s ribs and knocked him back.

Hux was up off the desk. He slid a monomolecular dagger from his sleeve and brandished it, swinging down at Kylo’s skull fiercely. Kylo dodged it at the last second and it punched through the durasteel floor where his right eye had been a moment before. Hux pulled it free and swung again, his face blank as it had been before. There was darkness in his eyes, the absence of a soul, of all warmth, as though he’d secreted it away somewhere. Kylo reached both palms out, and froze Hux’s body where it stood, holding him fast by his throat. He heaved himself up off the floor and removed the deadly blade from Hux’s hand. Kylo held the hilt in his own and concentrated, reducing it to dust in his grasp.

Then he let Hux go. Hux sank to his knees, gasping for air. “Kylo Ren,” he panted, rage plain on his face, “Even if I valued the institution you are the last man in the galaxy I would marry.”

“Your pride chokes you,” Kylo said, attempting to give Hux this out, to null the wound of his words.

“No,” Hux hissed, pointed at him, “no, that was you. You’ve done that.” He coughed wretchedly. “Get out of my quarters.” Kylo left. In his absence, Hux crawled to the wall to lean there, and wept brokenly through his aching throat.

Kylo returned to his room, shaking with anger and acute terror. He screamed within that soundproof box, and lifted everything not bolted down with the Force, obliterating each object and flinging the broken pieces against the walls.

  
  


In the early hours of the morning, Kylo was woken by the chime at his door of someone requesting entrance. As he slid from his bed in just his leggings, he thought that it must be a platoon of troopers, come to detain him for attacking the General. He summoned his saber to his hand and keyed open the door.

Hux stood alone in the hall, as perfectly coiffed as he’d been the day Kylo had first seen him, absent his command cap and with the addition of purple bruises peeking up over the top of his collar. Kylo eyed him warily, checking his hands for his blaster or a knife -- did Hux mean to strike him down himself?

“May I come in?” Hux asked quietly. Kylo stood aside. Hux entered and stood in the darkened room, unbuttoning the top three clasps of his collar and wincing as though it hurt him to do so, letting his uniform fall open. “Don’t be alarmed at my presence,” he said. He took in the wreckage of the room without surprise evident on his face and then looked back at Kylo. “I apologize for the pain I’ve caused you.”

“Don’t,” Kylo whispered, his eyes fixed on the dark bruising that traveled from Hux’s neck down onto his clavicles. The sight of it wrenched at him, making him sick just as much as it gratified that urge deep within him to mark Hux and to make Hux feel his own fear. Kylo set his saber aside on his desk by the door and held his hands up, empty.

“I will never marry,” Hux told him simply. “Not anyone. I won’t succumb to the trap my mother did, the one that killed her.” Kylo thought mutely of his grandfather, and nodded. Hux sighed, “It’s more than you need to know. More than you want to know, like as not. As I said at Hunt’s Ford, my mother was not Brendol Hux’s first wife, Maratelle. She was his scullery maid. A slave. Father spent his days chasing his staff around the kitchen as his wife entertained her _dearest friend_ Enric Pryde.”

Kylo interrupted, feeling anger rise in his chest. “Pryde?”

“The same,” Hux affirmed. “When he was done rolling Brendol’s wife around in his sheets he’d come downstairs and grope me too, from the time I was young.”

“You should have told me,” Kylo said, clenching his fists and then loosening them to try and dispel the buzzing energy in them, murder written plain on his face.

Hux smiled sadly at that. “Hm, that’s not how it works. The Order needs him, though I wish it weren’t so. Eventually Father divorced Maratelle. She took a hefty chunk of his credits and installed herself in Scarparus Port, and I had a few years reprieve from Pryde, at least at home. My mother...Sigo, that was her name. She had no family name. When Father dangled the promise of a marriage in front of her what could she do but accept? It cemented my future. But there are repercussions for abusing your slaves on Arkanis. Not many, but some. They have a monetary value, and the Order purchased her. Wives, on the other hand… he beat her to death within the year. I was there--” Hux broke off, taking a shaking breath.

Kylo moved toward him and stopped short, his hands dropping open at his sides, helpless. The hands he’d used to inflict pain on Hux only last night. Hux studied his face and gave him an admonishing look as though he were the mind reader. “Hux, if I’d known--” Kylo began.

“You wouldn’t have choked me? I tried to stab you. Water under the bridge, this time at least,” Hux said softly. Mournfully. “I won’t accept any proposal you make. Or anyone else’s, if that makes a difference to you.”

“I suppose,” Kylo said even as it tore at him, “I’ll have to content myself with calling you my co-commander.” He was gratified to see Hux relax, and wanted more than anything to let him stay that way, to leave things there where Hux was comfortable. But he needed to continue. “Hux…” he came close, gently reaching out, hovering his hands over Hux’s arms. Hux appraised him and then stepped into his arms. Kylo held him tight, hugging Hux into his chest and kissing his uniformed shoulder and then his temple. “You need to know that I’m not capable of sharing you.”

“Is that a threat?” Hux asked, even as he leaned his cheek against Kylo’s.

Kylo struggled, and then let himself go, bringing the awful truth to Hux like an offering. “It’s only fair. I can’t leave you.” Hux pulled back to look at him, those pale green eyes meeting his, and they gleamed with something. Kylo couldn’t yet bring himself to hope it was the love Hux had said he carried for Kylo.

“Then we’re back where we were,” said Hux. Kylo gave him a confused look. “We are at the point of deciding what we are to do about this.” Before Kylo could speak, Hux forged on. “You’ve been very good, haven’t you, about not reading my mind? I’ve hardly felt it.”

“I-I’ve tried,” Kylo said.

“You may, right now. For just a moment.”

Kylo hesitated until Hux nodded at him, and then reached out with his mind, finding Hux’s. He tried to pry it open as delicately as possible, though Hux still winced at the sharp headache it caused. Kylo found himself in a vast library, meticulously ordered shelves stretching on for miles as rain beat against the tall windows, casting its muted and wavering light over all. Kylo could smell the scent of the books and the antique wood and the ozone of the storm.

“Here,” Hux called, and Kylo jogged toward the sound, turning down one of the aisles. There Hux stood, though he wasn’t in uniform. He wore a simple moss green sweater, worn soft with age, and loose gray trousers. He had a pair of transparent-framed reading glasses perched low on his nose. “This is really incredible,” he said, as much to himself as to Kylo. “I don’t think this way, you know. But I know where everything is here.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Think this way,” Kylo said. “Only Force users do. I’m helping you to see it.”

“What is yours like?”

“Unlike this. What did you want me to see?”

Hux pulled a book from the shelf, a new one, the spine only just cracked. It was bound in simple black, the pages edged in red. He held it out. Kylo put his palm on it, and was overcome. His own memories coursed through him from the inside out, and he realized he was seeing himself through Hux’s eyes, feeling what Hux felt. There was attraction, desire, and there was rage. Hux’s rage, the sort he’d honed into a weapon. Kylo felt Hux’s ambition as though it were his own. And as he watched himself, lit by the crackling red glow of his saber, tearing through his enemies, their bodies bent to his will just as the entire galaxy would be, he felt Hux’s lust surge through him. Lust for Kylo’s abilities as well as his body. The need to see whatever would come of Kylo’s life. To witness it firsthand.

“Oh,” he breathed.

“Do you understand now?” Hux asked gently. “I can’t leave you either. Now, out. It’s beginning to sting.”

Kylo sank back into himself, the library blurring back into his own darkened gray room, and Hux slumped in his arms with a weak groan. “Hux,” Kylo said, holding him against his chest and then moving awkwardly to his bed to lay the man down. “Hux, are you with me?”

“I’m awake,” Hux said. “Stars, I wish I wasn’t. I can’t see.”

“It will pass. A stim will help the headache.” Kylo pulled his medkit out from under his bed to fetch one.

“That would be an effective interrogation technique.”

“You almost passed out and you invited me,” Kylo said, administering a stim shot to the inside of Hux’s elbow. “It’s only safe to touch the outside of people’s minds, look at what they’re currently feeling or thinking. Most people can’t detect that. You’re sensitive to it. Digging up memories against someone’s will gets bloody.”

“That’s precisely why I said it would be effective,” Hux murmured, blinking rapidly as his vision came back to him and his eyes focused.

“You should rest,” said Kylo. “I’ll ask Mitaka to clear your schedule for the day. I’ll tell him we’re checking one of the mines.”

Hux didn’t argue, betraying just how drained he felt. Kylo wandered to his desk and sent the message to Mitaka and then returned, carefully stripping Hux of his uniform top and trousers and boots and setting them aside, leaving him in his regulation socks, tank and boxers. “You don’t know anything about folding,” Hux said, observing from slitted eyes. Kylo crawled into bed next to him without a word, faintly worried that his face betrayed how lovesick he felt.

“Come here,” Hux ordered, and Kylo fit himself against Hux, holding him close. He ran his hand up and down Hux’s side, feeling his ribs and the softer plane of muscle and fat down to his hip bone. He wanted to dig his fingers in and pull them out red and lick them clean, as if he himself were one of the Stricken. If he could pull Hux’s heart from his chest and bite into it just as they’d done together at Hunt’s Ford without losing Hux, Kylo would do it without hesitation. He settled for mouthing soft kisses along Hux’s shoulder. “The moment I’ve recovered I intend to have you,” said Hux. One of Hux’s hands traced up Kylo’s exposed upper abs, making them clench. “Look at you. Ridiculous.”

The images Kylo had been enjoying suddenly switched and it was Hux digging white hands into him, ripping free slick handfuls and bringing them to his mouth. Kylo replayed his memory of Hux biting into that guard’s heart and imagined it was his own, his life’s blood running down Hux’s chin as he chewed thoughtfully, savoring it. Heat bloomed low in his stomach and his cock stiffened in his leggings. He was vaguely surprised that the idea of Hux consuming and owning him excited him as much as -- if not more than -- if their positions were reversed. He ground himself slow against Hux’s hip and bit his shoulder softly, not hard enough to leave a mark. Not with the ring of bruises still so dark on his neck.

“Stars, is that your--” Hux sat up, looking down to verify what he’d just felt and then laying back again with an exasperated huff. “You’re a cosmic injustice. Are you aware of that?” without waiting for a response, Hux fixed Kylo with a particularly scorching look and said, “We are making use of that tonight. What’s your preference?”

Anxiety dampened Kylo’s excitement. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I haven’t--”

“Ha! Of course you haven’t, nothing is ever easy with you,” Hux snipped, but his voice betrayed his good humor and Kylo couldn’t bring himself to glare at him, especially as Hux’s hand dipped down to trace the outline of his erection through the fabric constraining it. “Do you want to fuck me?”

“Say that again,” Kylo breathed, leaning in to kiss Hux’s cheek next, moving his hips forward to press himself against Hux’s hand. Hux chuckled.

“Why?”

“I like hearing it in your accent.”

Hux pushed him back and climbed on top of him, straddling one of Kylo’s thighs so that he could grind against him too, and Kylo made a choked sound at the feeling of Hux’s cock hard and hot against him through their clothes. Hux leaned down and pushed Kylo’s hair away from his ear -- Kylo had always thought they were too big, always tried to hide them, but he twisted his face away now to give Hux full access. Hux licked along the shell of his ear, and Kylo felt it redden, growing hot with blood. Hux nipped at Kylo’s jaw just below his ear and then took his earlobe into his mouth, sucking gently. Kylo held tight to Hux’s waist, canting his hips up, rubbing himself off against Hux’s slim thigh. Hux pulled back and murmured low, his voice deliciously rough with desire, “Kylo, do you want to fuck me?”

Kylo gasped and turned back to kiss Hux, licking into Hux’s mouth, desperate to taste him. He tasted of his toothpaste and Kylo said as much. “And you taste exactly like you haven’t brushed your teeth yet,” Hux admonished, though it didn’t seem to turn him off of kissing Kylo’s breath away.

“Please tell me you’re feeling recovered,” Kylo said when they broke for air.

“Do you have lubricant?”

“...No.”

“Then come back to my quarters,” Hux sat up and pulled away, making Kylo grunt at the loss of contact. “And brush your teeth first. I’ll be waiting.” Hux put on his uniform, scowling at the wrinkles in it, and left. Kylo’s door slid open and closed with a quiet whoosh, and he shakily got up and made his way to his fresher.

Kylo brushed his teeth and tongue thoroughly, scrubbing his back molars until the bristles of his toothbrush nearly squeaked against them. He wondered whether he should go for a quick shower, weighing more time between himself and Hux against his anxiety to make a good impression. In the end he decided against it, only taking his saber with him to Hux’s room, and only that because he was never without it. He walked down the executive hall barefoot, the steel floor cold on his feet, and presented himself at Hux’s door, requesting entry.

  
  


The door slid open without Hux there to greet him, and he entered, letting it close behind him. Hux had cleaned up the remnants of his monomolecular blade, but the puncture mark in the floor was still there. “Hux?” Kylo called, laying his saber aside on the mantle.

“Here,” Hux answered, an echo of their time inside his mind. Kylo followed the voice into Hux’s bedroom, dimmed. Hux had set the transparisteel windows into a darkened, mirrored setting, shutting out the world beyond them. The room was reflected in the black glass, a muted ghost of itself.

Kylo stopped short, sagging into the doorframe. Hux was nude, laying in his bed atop the comforter with his knees spread and drawn up, a bottle of clear lubricant thrown aside next to him, plunging three of his fingers on one hand into himself, the other lazily stroking his cock. “Thought I’d get started,” Hux said, “You’re rather large. Get those off,” Hux’s eyes trailed down to Kylo’s leggings. “Let me see you.”

Kylo shakily pulled them down and stepped out of them, crossing the room to the bed and crawling onto it, his own cock bobbing slightly with his movements, stiffening again and standing up in the absence of his clothing. His joints felt liquid and his blood was roaring in his ears.

“Stars you’re gorgeous,” Hux breathed, pressing his fingers in deep as his eyes wandered down Kylo’s body.

“Your hair’s red everywhere,” Kylo said, moving to put his hands on Hux’s waist and then faltering, sitting there on his knees, at a loss for what to do.

Hux withdrew his fingers from himself. “You take over. Yours are bigger anyway.” He grabbed the bottle of lube and tossed it up. Kylo caught it smoothly and slicked the digits of his right hand, moving forward to lean over Hux. “Two,” Hux instructed. Kylo slid two into Hux’s body, marveling at the heat of him. He was slow, careful...too careful. Hux snorted at him and raised his eyebrows, and Kylo drove his fingers in completely. “Do you feel, it feels different...here, do this,” Hux showed Kylo with his own hand, sticking two fingers out and then curling them up as if he were beckoning Kylo near. Kylo repeated the motion inside him and Hux arched his back suddenly, his eyes fluttering closed. “ _There_ ,” he gasped. “Do you feel--”

“Yes,” said Kylo, circling his fingers around the area of flesh that had made Hux squirm and then pressing against it again. Hux’s left leg shuddered and his cock leaked clear precome down its shaft. Kylo batted Hux’s hand away from it to fist it in his own, squeezing up from root to tip. There were a couple false starts before he synced up the motions of his fingers inside Hux and his palm on his dick, and then the rhythm locked in. Hux’s hands gripped the comforter on either side of his body, the tendons on the backs of them standing out, and he moaned. The sound went straight to Kylo’s groin, making his cock throb.

“Okay,” Hux said. “Okay, I’m ready,” and then when Kylo didn’t relent, “I don’t want to come until you’re in me.” Kylo cursed and pulled his fingers out, going for the bottle again to slick himself generously. He panted at the needed attention as he spread lube on his cock. He felt feverish. Heat pooled like lava below his navel and a flush was creeping down his neck to rival the one currently painted across Hux’s cheekbones and chest.

“Not here,” Hux said, sitting up and sliding away before Kylo thought to grab for him. He went to the wide cushioned window seat set into the wall and knelt on it facing out, up on his knees with his legs spread, hands up on the darkened glass. His muted reflection was pressed against his front, wearing the same collar of bruises as Hux himself. He looked back at Kylo, leaning his face against the glass, cheek-to-cheek with himself. His twin looked back at the dimly-reflected Kylo behind them. “Here. I want you like this.”

Kylo went to him, sliding one hand up Hux’s leg to his hip, watching how it made him shiver. He moved his other hand into place in the same way, leaving a faintly shining trail of lube on Hux’s skin, and then tugged Hux’s hips back and lined himself up. He looked up the curve of Hux’s spine, enticingly displayed like this, and bit back a groan when he met the green flash of the corner of Hux’s eye looking back at him.

“You’re _mine_ now,” Kylo said, and pushed in. His thoughts were overtaken by pure sensation. All else faded away. He forgot himself, and his world narrowed so that the only thing in it was this connection. Hux was hot and tight around him, even more so as Kylo bottomed out and the stretch made Hux clench down on him. Kylo grunted, closing his eyes and gripping Hux’s hips hard, fighting against the feeling that he was going to come right then. Once it passed, he withdrew and pushed back in, repeating the motion at odd intervals until he found the pattern and depth that made Hux arch again and cry out. Between them they filled the quiet of the room with their harsh breaths and desperate sounds. In the dark mirror before them, their reflections rutted the same as they were, eyes gone soft and faces flushed, hair sweaty and disheveled. Hux’s breath fogged the glass, obscuring his reflection’s face.

Kylo suddenly felt the flickering pleasure building in his groin intensify, and thought madly for a moment that he was being fucked as well as fucking Hux, and then he realized he had touched Hux’s mind. “Sorry,” he panted, “I’m sorry.”

“What?” Hux’s voice was ragged, pleasure-soaked and annoyed at the interruption.

“You don’t feel…?”

“It feels good, don’t stop,” Hux moaned. Another brush against Hux’s mind, and Kylo cursed, feeling his orgasm building.

“Won’t last.” He pulled out. Hux whined. “Face me,” Kylo said, his voice pleading. He backed up to give Hux room to turn around, which he did, shaking. Kylo surged up, kneeling on the window seat himself and fully lifting Hux up against the glass with an arm under each leg. Hux reached between them and guided him as he sank back in, both of them groaning with relief. Hux braced his hands on Kylo’s shoulders and Kylo resumed the pace he’d been keeping. Now that Hux’s face was in front of him, his full mouth soft and parted and his copper eyelashes catching the light as he closed his eyes in ecstasy, Kylo knew he was done for. “Hux I’m going to--”

Hux palmed himself in one of his hands, pumping his cock to catch up to Kylo. “Come for me,” he said, opening his eyes and looking right into Kylo’s. Kylo did, the sweltering electric feeling of his orgasm branching out from his cock and balls through his whole body. His legs shook, his left knee nearly slipping off the window seat. His eyes closed against his will.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Kylo said, rocking himself deep through his aftershocks as he spilled into Hux.

Hux’s voice broke through the haze. “Look at me. _Kylo_ , look--” Kylo’s eyes opened and found Hux’s again as if they were magnetically drawn there, and Hux finished himself off with a twist of his wrist. His pupils were dilated wide, only the tiniest sliver of green rimming the edges. He took heaving breaths, his body clenching hard around Kylo’s cock still inside him, shuddering. He painted his fist and stomach with stripes of white, his form growing rigid and then loosening.

Kylo pulled out, hissing, oversensitive, and settled Hux back down onto the window seat. They stared at each other, spent, and then Kylo backed off the seat and lowered himself, licking up Hux’s come from his stomach. Kylo was meticulous in this effort, perhaps the first time in his life the word could be applied to him. He didn’t want to miss a drop. He relished the salt of it, revelled in consuming something of Hux. Hux laughed breathlessly, burying his clean hand in Kylo’s hair. He twitched when Kylo’s tongue licked his other hand clean as well, and then he fisted that one in Kylo’s hair too and used it to pull him up, kissing him hungrily.

Kylo bit Hux’s lower lip, tugging on it until Hux groaned and then releasing it to invade his mouth, licking into the slick velvet heat of it, holding his jaw with one hand and pushing him back against the glass until their teeth clicked. Hux made a more pointed, purposeful noise into his mouth and Kylo released him.

“I do have to breathe,” Hux panted, smiling languidly.

“Was that...was it, for you…”

“Beyond satisfactory, Kylo.”

Kylo took Hux’s hand and held it to his chest, letting Hux feel the pounding beat of his heart there. He thought for the second time that he wouldn’t mind if Hux snatched it out. Instead, Hux pushed against him, pushing him back and up.

“Bed,” he ordered, tugging Kylo around and under the covers with him. They lay tangled together, falling into a dreamless rest, the bright sunlight outside unable to penetrate the space of that room. This, the first of many times, they would always remember. Within the month mining operations on the planet were completed, and they moved on to a new stage of their parallel lives.

On the abandoned surface of H-19, the dead still clawed their way out of crypt and coffin and bare soil in search of hot blood they would not find. The galaxy remained in the growing shadow of the First Order. On both sides victories were celebrated and losses lamented. Armitage Hux and Kylo Ren took to the _Finalizer_ , a ship which surpassed Hux’s hopes for it. Hux remained a groom of death rather than wedded to an Imperial relic, and dove into the design of a new superweapon, one that would eclipse the Death Star in galactic histories. In the dead of night-shift, he shared his bed and breath with the leader of the Knights of Ren, two evils intertwined so thoroughly in mind and body that for precious moments they seemed one, their hearts burning with the only thing more powerful than the call of the Force.

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate summary: Hux consumes human flesh to make a point and consequently Kylo falls deep in love.
> 
> This fic also doubles as a game of spot the Pride and Prejudice lines. Richard E Grant is delightful but Pryde is not. Depending on your preferred flavor this could be an AU where Hux and Kylo live happily(?) ever after, or they could break up sometime before TFA causing their antagonistic relationship there. In which case Kylo putting Hux on Pryde's ship in TROS would be exceedingly cruel.
> 
> TW:  
> * Typical zombie-style violence and gore  
> * Hux eats his human opponent's heart after winning a duel (to be fair he's had a rough couple days)  
> * Kylo is a screwed up dumb boi and gets turned on seeing Hux eat a human heart so his sexual awakening is tied in with violence  
> * Kylo fantasizes sexually about consuming Hux's organs and Hux consuming his, none of this is actually done, they have regular sex and Hux would probably be like Kylo what the fuck if he knew  
> * Vague references to past sexual violence and regular violence for Hux and Hux's mom, no descriptions of it  
> * No one is emotionally healthy -- consensual but not safe or sane tag applied to feelings


End file.
